


Madman Across the Water

by severinne



Category: Life on Mars (UK)
Genre: Bondage, Dubious Consent, Insanity, M/M, Time Travel, Timey-Wimey, Unresolved Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-08-31
Updated: 2011-08-31
Packaged: 2017-10-23 07:07:51
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 9
Words: 29,134
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/247569
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/severinne/pseuds/severinne
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Gene has his regrets about Tony Crane's fate but would just as soon leave the past where it belongs. Too bad that Sam, hardly knowing the difference between past and future anymore, isn't content to let sleeping madmen lie.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the 2011 Life on Mars Big Bang.
> 
> Big thanks are owed to Draycevixen for early plot bunny support, Chamekke for 11th hour cheerleading, and the lovely Big Bang mod Hambel for her saintlike patience while I struggled to pull this together.
> 
> This fic presupposes reader familiarity with much of LoM canon with special emphasis on 2.01; readers new to the fandom may want to catch up that far in their viewing before sinking into this. Title is in reference to the Elton John song of the same name, which is referenced at several points throughout the story.

He supposed he should be more alarmed by the way this day had gone.

There was nothing good about an arrest, something Tony knew full well through frustrating experience, but the worst thing about it for now was that the waste of time was both inconvenient and mind-numbingly dull.

With his hands hobbled by handcuffs, Tony had to twist his shoulders near the point of pain in order to worm his fingers into the side pocket of his coat, flicking clumsily into its furred folds until he finally snagged his cigarette case and a book of matches. He let them drop onto the stained leather of the backseat, leaving the matches where they fell while he concentrated on the work of fishing a cigarillo from his case without knocking them all loose to the Cortina’s littered floor. Even once he had a smoke perched between his puckered lips, the work of striking a match proved tricky with the handcuffs; he cursed beneath his breath as the first match flew from his fingers and landed among the take-away wrappings at his feet.

‘Don’t suppose either of you gentleman has a light?’ he asked cordially, the words muffled around his unlit cigarillo.

Hunt grunted. Tyler made no sound, but the twist of his mouth as he shot a slanting look over his shoulder was ringing with contempt. Tony met it boldly with a patient smile, pausing to remove the cigarillo from between his lips to make it truly shine.

‘Tricky thing, lighting a match with these cuffs on,’ he explained, rattling his hands to demonstrate. ‘I’m sure you know how it is.’

He added a wink for effect, gratified to see Tyler’s ashen face flush before he snapped his head pointedly forward again, though not without glancing worriedly at Hunt on his way around.

Good.

‘Mr. Hunt?’ Tony shifted along the back seat, straining his neck to catch a glimpse of sea-green eyes in the rearview mirror, finally finding them narrowed and aimed stonily forward. ‘Come on, I’m gasping for a smoke here.’

‘Then light it yourself,’ Hunt muttered stiffly. ‘You’re a crafty lad.’

The subtle sting in his reply landed true enough to trigger a whisper of guilt at the back of his mind. Whispers, thankfully, always died down to silence soon enough so Tony pushed onward. ‘What, not even for old time’s sake? Gene…’

As he had hoped, the use of his first name snared Hunt’s attention. ‘Piss off,’ he snarled with a backward glare, broad shoulders rolling aside with a heavy intent that made the driver’s seat press down on the point of Tony’s knee.

‘Jesus, Guv, watch the road,’ Tyler snapped anxiously. ‘You trying to get us killed?’

Hunt fixed Tony with a last warning look before turning sullenly back to the road. ‘Alright, Gladys,’ he muttered, ‘keep your knickers on.’

Stifling his amusement at Hunt’s hen-pecked deference, Tony watched Tyler’s profile instead as he continued to stare down his Guv with an exasperated frown. ‘Just ignore him,’ Tyler added sternly, casting a disgusted look at Tony from the corner of his eye. ‘He’s trying to wind you up is all.’

‘No, I’m trying to have a smoke,’ he correctly gently. ‘Is asking to borrow DCI Hunt’s lighter so much trouble?’

‘He’s driving,’ Tyler said tightly.

‘Thought we were ignoring him,’ Hunt remarked wryly.

‘Piss off.’ With a parting murderous glare at them both, Tyler stared pointedly out his passenger side window, rejecting his fellow passengers as easy as though they didn’t exist. That, Tony decided, wouldn’t do at all.

‘Then maybe you could get DCI Hunt’s lighter for me?’ he asked.

Tyler let loose a scoffing snort. ‘I’m not frisking my Guv just so you can smoke.’

‘You don’t have to,’ he said patiently. ‘Inside jacket pocket, left side.’

Sinking back into his seat, Tony returned his cigarillo to his mouth, savouring the rich tobacco growing moist between his lips as he watched the fallout. He delighted in the quick reflexes that whiplashed Tyler’s neck back around to Hunt, almost as much as he admired Hunt’s stoic silence even as his shoulders stiffened beneath the camelhair and his gloved fingers clenched tight around the steering wheel. He expected little more reaction than that, but the silence that muffled the inside of the car had already turned corrosive, alive with suspicions ready to ignite.

With a private smirk, Tony struck a second match and set their tiny world on fire.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning for dub-con sexual content in this chapter.

Despite Gene’s usual disregard for speed limits, Sam was stunned to realize that Ray and Chris had beaten the Cortina back to the station. They loitered indifferently at the front desk, taking only the slightest notice as Gene and him corralled Crane into the station, an awkward scrum that threatened to break as three bodies fought to stay abreast through two swinging doors.

‘Here.’ Before Sam could open his mouth to address Phyllis, Gene had already yanked Crane out of Sam’s grasp, flinging him like a discarded hanky towards Ray. ‘Book him, then get his skinny arse upstairs.’

‘Sure thing, Guv.’

Sam stalled, empty-handed and wrong footed until Gene grabbed him by the arm and dragged him past the desk.

‘Leave the sodding paperwork,’ he growled warningly, plucking the concern clean from the back of Sam’s whirling mind. ‘We need to have a little chat.’

The heavy grip of Gene’s thick fingers around his upper arm squeezed out the last of the fog that had left Sam breathlessly distracted through the surreal rush of too many near-death experiences and the surprise of survival. His fear was bled dry, and the cryptic words that Crane had uttered on the drive here no longer left him panicked and confused, but rather compressed his rattled nerves into a diamond’s bite of determination.

Having a little chat with Gene suddenly seemed like a bloody good idea.

He made the heels of his Cuban boots ring out every bit as loud and obnoxious as the slap of Gene’s loafers on the linoleum, rallying accusations at the tips of his flickering fingers as they waited for the lift to arrive for the juddering journey up to CID.

‘I told you Crane was bad news,’ he spat out as soon as they were alone in the sweat-stinking conveyance, temper rising when Gene responded with an amused huff of breath riding the contempt of a sidelong glance.

‘Is an I-told-you-so the best you can do, Tyler?’ Rolling his shoulders back against the wood-veneered wall, Gene squinted ponderously at a buzzing fluorescent tube in the lift’s ceiling. ‘Gonna need something a lot more like that evidence you’re normally so bloody fond of to make this one stick.’

Sam sputtered in disbelief. ‘He tried to mow me down with his car,’ he threw back. ‘In front of police witnesses!’

‘And if I went about town banging up every bloke who’d had the same idea, I’d get nothing else done!’ Gene growled back. ‘Seeing as I’d have to start with myself.’

‘Piss off.’ Sam matched his DCI’s irate glare until mutual unspoken agreement broke the standoff and left them both scowling at the lift doors, waiting for the claustrophobic climb upward to end. Sam nearly sagged with relief as the metal doors creaked open, missing his opportunity to precede Gene out into the corridor; he charged instead at Gene’s heels, lips firmly pressed together until they reached the privacy of Gene’s office.

‘Right from the bloody start, you’ve been defending that crooked bastard.’ Sam kicked the door closed behind them and leaning back against the glass with arms crossed tight across his chest. His lungs still ached for the air that had nearly been snatched away from him, and anger made every breath since come up far too short. ‘I want to know why.’

‘How many times…’ Gene crossed his arms as well, slouching back against the edge of his desk. ‘No evidence, remember?’

‘Like that’s ever bothered you before,’ he scoffed. Sam bit down on his lower lip, taking in the long assertive stretch of Gene’s powerful frame starting from widely set legs and gliding all the way up, noting the contrary twitch of evasive withdrawal in his side-turned face. ‘It’s Crane, innit?’

‘What about Crane?’

‘What you said, back when Ray traced the crown chip back to his casino.’ Pushing off from the partition wall, Sam crossed the office, narrowed eyes fixed on Gene’s tightening features. ‘You said you knew the owner.’

The pale green of Gene’s eyes flicked towards him, then squinted away. ‘Yeah. And?’

‘You _knew_ Crane before this even kicked off.’ Sam drove the point home slower, louder.

‘And you had it out for him before he so much as batted an eyelash in your direction.’ With a shove away from his desk that set its legs scraping across the floor, Gene stood to his full impressive height and attempted to stop Sam in his tracks with a hard, withering glare. ‘So what’s your bloody point?’

‘Do I need to spell it out?’ Ignoring the warning in his eyes, Sam crossed into the personal space that had scarcely ever existed between them in the first place, close enough that he needed to tilt his chin upward slightly to hold Gene’s gaze. ‘He’s got you deep in his pocket, hasn’t he?’

‘Bullshit.’ His hush was as low and foreboding as Sam’s.

‘Then what the hell is your excuse for blocking me every bloody step of the way during this case?’

‘What’s _your_ excuse for putting that righteous, snot-nosed attitude of yours ahead of all that procedure you pretend to give a shit about?’

‘I have my reasons,’ Sam growled. He held his ground, swallowed down the anxiety that threatened to wash out the necessary force of his anger and it must have worked because Gene, amazingly enough, merely grunted his disbelief and glanced past Sam’s tensed shoulder. Something caught his attention, something that made his jaw clench as his watchful gaze slide sideways.

‘Don’t matter anyway.’ Gene turned from Sam and drifted like a sleepwalker, closer to the windows as Chris and Ray escorted a visibly bemused Tony Crane into CID and, almost as an afterthought, secured one of his wrists to a bank of filing cabinets.

‘He’s still got us by the short and curlies,’ Gene added out loud, almost to himself. ‘We’ve got no evidence.’

Sam drew up alongside Gene at the window, eyes narrowed as Crane stood from his chair and clumsily wrestled his way one-handed out of that foppish fur coat of his. As he twisted on the spot, Crane’s clear eyes darted between the broken slats of the blinds, meeting Sam’s gaze with unnerving accuracy.

‘We could cut the henchmen a deal,’ he reasoned, forcing himself to turn away, ‘if they finger Crane.’

‘We’re in the public glare.’ Gene’s tone had gone as level and balanced as Sam’s, unusually solemn green eyes still gazing through the blinds. ‘So I have to make this watertight.’

 _‘We have to make this watertight, Sam.’_ The echo at the back of Sam’s mind was feminine, her Mancunian accent sweetened by a South Asian lilt. Maya. She hadn’t believed him either, back then. Back when this same farce would repeat itself some thirty years from now.

 _‘We need to get him off the streets, Maya. Before more people get hurt.’_

 _‘Sam… I know why you’re upset, I’ve got a bad feeling about him too…’_

‘Excuse me, sir?’ Annie’s voice chimed itself against the flow of Maya in his head, making Sam shudder with a confusion of past and present, of present and future.

‘Not now, love. Grown-up talk.’ The suited bulk of Gene’s body turned as a blur at the edge of Sam’s vision, drawing his attention back out the window to where Crane was prodding experimentally at the filing cabinet. It tipped beneath the push of his hand and Ray, miraculously, moved to stop him.

‘I heard him order the attack on you and McKee,’ Sam added urgently, ‘at least, I took that to mean–’

‘No. Evidence.’

 _‘Can’t you see we’re wasting our time?’_

This time, Maya’s impatient voice in his head drowned out whatever Annie may have said; Sam wasn’t sure she had spoken at all save for Gene’s sarcastic, ‘Can you not see our lips moving, sweetheart?’

‘We rack up the pressure on him,’ he pressed on, trying to rush ahead of the past’s grasping whispers. ‘We hold him on remand, until–’

‘What with?’ Gene growled back. ‘No. Evidence!’

‘Excuse me.’ Annie’s firmer, more assertive interruption successfully washed out the conspiracy of Gene’s barking objections and Maya’s softer but no less insistent protests. ‘I did some work. On the crime scene? It might help.’

Sam blinked back at her, slow to comprehend her meaning even as Gene grunted his reluctant agreement and followed her out the door. _‘Talking is a waste of time, not this.’_ Sam remembered now, that last thing he had said to Maya after the search, before she had stormed after the long-gone constables. Gene let the door swing shut behind him, a scraping thud that weakly echoed the louder bang of Tony Crane’s office door as Maya slammed it shut –

– and threw him back, gaspingly alone, to 2006.

Tony Crane glanced over his shoulder and offered a sympathetic smile.

‘Woman troubles, DCI Tyler?’

Forcing himself to ignore the reverberating door, Sam sharply straightened out the cuffs of his navy suit. ‘I will get you, you know.’ Sam spoke with the low sincerity of a sacred vow even as he knew that there was nothing saintly in his motivations. Horribly, the smirk on Crane’s wide lips seemed to recognize the font of that promise as something nearer to his own soul.

‘You really think so,’ he replied lightly, returning his attention to the tall cabinet flung open by the recent search. Sam may have worried about what Crane was doing in there if his own people hadn’t been compelled to confirm three separate times that there was nothing illicit in there, nothing illicit _anywhere_ in this office.

Nothing, save Tony Crane himself.

‘Money can’t conceal your crimes forever,’ he continued stubbornly, narrowed eyes tracking Crane as he stepped away from the cabinet, picking up his hastily discarded things from the floor with fastidious calm. ‘You can pay people to lie but that doesn’t mean we won’t find out about it sooner or later.’

‘Loyalty runs deeper than a paycheque.’ Crane threw him a near-pitying look as he sank into his desk chair. ‘I couldn’t have bought the loyalty I enjoy from my people, any more than you can snatch it away with a wave of your badge.’

Frustrated by Crane’s easy indifference, Sam tightly crossed his arms, tongue poking the backs of his teeth as he weighed his next words. The discovery he had made so recently was prickling through his bloodstream like drops of acid; he needed to drain that burn from his body and mind.

‘Your wife doesn’t need to see my badge to know what kind of monster you are.’

Crane’s long eyelashes batted twice – once for disbelief, a second for cunning – before he flashed a coy grin. ‘You’re right about that much at least,’ he said with a winking leer. ‘But really, Inspector… my Eve and I have been through more together than you’ve even lived. You’d never get her to turn against me.’

‘I could, though,’ he insisted, fingers twitching in the crooks of his elbows, ‘if I were to mention what I saw last week at Taurus.’

The intelligent gleam of Crane’s eye revealed his perfect understanding of the bar’s name and reputation. ‘It’s a very mixed crowd there these days,’ he said slowly. ‘I thought an enlightened man such as yourself would know that.’

Sam silently congratulated himself for not blushing as he rushed out the next killing mouthful of words. ‘It’s more what you were up to _outside_ Taurus that night,’ he added significantly. ‘In the alley, to be exact.’

‘Ah.’ Crane tilted his head to the side, sending the light on the crown of his dark hair racing down to the silver gracing his temples. ‘And to be exact, how did you find yourself in such an alley in the first place?’

Even though he could feel a shamed heat already crawling up his neck, Sam screwed up his resolve and narrowed his eyes. ‘I was doing my job,’ he said stiffly.

‘Really.’ The tip of Crane’s tongue poked the inside of his cheek as his eyes trailed over Sam’s rigid body. ‘Wish I’d known you had a side business going on Canal Street. You’re much more my type that the young man you spotted me with.’

Sam briskly shook off the insult along with the confusing lurch at what almost sounded like a compliment. ‘You’re being awfully careless for a man who’s screwing rentboys behind his wife’s back,’ he snapped impatiently.

‘Jimmy’s no rentboy,’ Crane sighed, ‘just easy to get. And it’s not screwing around when one’s wife already knows.’

‘She doesn’t.’ The protest fell numb from his lips. Sam could already feel his hopes deflating, improbable as it seemed.

‘It’s like I said, we’ve had a very long, very trusting relationship. Far more understanding, say, than the one you’re so clearly not enjoying with that lovely Sergeant of yours.’

With a scowl, Sam pushed Maya’s disapproval out of mind and glared at his gleaming black shoes, momentarily disarmed by the strain of striking piano and guitar chords thrumming at the edge of his awareness. Visually scanning the room once again, he spotted the record spinning on an expensively restored vintage turntable kept safe in the cabinet, traced the vaguely ominous music to the discrete modern speakers set about Crane’s office. There was no denying that the antiquated vinyl sounded as rich and lush as its owner, making Sam’s latest iPod and home surround sound system seem cheap and tinny by comparison.

 _There’s a joke and I know it very well  
It’s one of those that I told you long ago  
Take my word, I’m a madman, don’t you know_

Shaking off the flow of lyrics, Sam fixed Crane with a pointed stare. ‘So you fancy Elton John and all, do you?’

He had none of the bigotry in his heart needed to make the barb strike where it was meant to hurt; Crane’s easy smirk labeled the attempt for the failure it was. ‘Of course I do,’ he replied smoothly. ‘Don’t you?’

Sam pursed his lips, thinking about the Goodbye Yellow Brick Road CD in his collection, the many more digital files filling the iPod in his Jeep. ‘Maybe I do, yeah,’ he admitted grudgingly.

‘Well, that’s one thing we have in common.’ Crane rose from his desk chair in a slow unfurling of limbs. ‘Who knows what other shared interests we might find if we just went looking for them?’

‘We’re nothing alike.’

‘The evidence already disagrees with you,’ he said, waving an indifferent hand at the record spinning on the turntable. ‘But music is superficial… should I go on?’

Sam bristled on the spot, tempted but refusing to take a measured step backward as Crane rounded his wide desk and drew closer by languid strides that echoed off the harder rhythms of the record on its turntable.

 _Get a load of him, he’s so insane  
You better get your coat, dear, it looks like rain_

‘I know, for example, just by looking…’ Crane paused to make his looking obvious in a slow downward drag of his eyes that made Sam shiver beneath his suit, ‘that you care deeply about appearances. Your suit isn’t anything special, but it’s certainly the best you could afford on that new Chief Inspector’s pay packet. Your mobile is even a bit beyond what a reasonable man in your shoes would spend on his gadgets. And the Jeep parked outside… well.’ Crane smirked knowingly. ‘Need I go on?’

‘If you have a point to make,’ Sam said tightly.

‘You want to be taken seriously.’

‘I _am_ taken seriously,’ he sneered back. ‘I’m a bloody DCI, in case you forgot.’

‘And you can scarcely believe it yourself, can you?’ A sharp glint of amusement hardened Crane’s eyes. ‘Must’ve wanted to be a copper all your little life, and look at you now… just gone thirty and already in charge of CID.’

Sam swallowed hard, aware that his hands were moving restlessly at his sides to the sound of blistering violins filling the room and willing them to be still for once. ‘I earned it,’ he hissed.

‘But not everyone thinks so, do they?’ Hands in pockets, Crane drew to a wavering stop a scant foot away from where Sam stood at the precipice of panic. ‘That’s who you’re playing dress-up for with the big man’s car and pretty suits… all those long-serving detectives on the force who want to know how much cock little Sam Tyler had to suck in the Chief Superintendent’s office to get that shiny promotion.’

The insinuation was too much; Sam’s hand clenched into a fist and threw itself at the other man before he could rationalize a more appropriate response. He hated police brutality, and that combined with the raw emotion behind his loss of control made his punch fly wide of Crane’s smug face. His cruel grin widened as he flung his arm up with shocking readiness, aborting Sam’s fist with a bruising grip around his wrist. Sam jerked his arm back, snarled as Crane clenched his fingers tighter and pulled him closer instead.

‘Get your hand off me,’ Sam gritted out, one deliberate syllable at a time.

‘Why should I do that?’ Even through the secure layers of Sam’s jacket and shirt cuff, the throbbing weight of Crane’s thumb was too close, too intimate. ‘You might try to hit me again… once I can forgive, but twice?’ Crane clucked his tongue softly. ‘Twice, and I might have to report it.’

Fear corkscrewed through Sam’s chest, stopping his heart for a taut moment of hesitation in which the heat of Crane’s hand trapping his wrist flared too hot. He scowled, yanked his arm sharply backward again but Crane rode rather than resisted his momentum, pushing forward as Sam wrenched back and driving them both into the shelves behind. The impact of his body with solid oak knocked the breath from his lungs; his shoulders heaved against the shelves’ hard edges as he braced to fight back.

‘Let. Go.’ He pronounced each word distinct and sharp, giving Crane one last chance to leave it before lashing out. Not that he expected anything so easy as that.

No more than he expected Crane’s other hand rising to his face, not to strike but to brush tentative fingertips over his lower lip, so perversely gentle compared to the hand still clamped hard around his wrist but with pressure enough to tug tantalizingly at the shock-slackened flesh. The delicate frisson of his touch obliterated the plan that had been building itself in Sam’s anxious mind, leaving him stunned speechless.

 _Take my word, I’m a madman, don’t you know  
The ground’s a long way down but I need more_

‘Stop.’ He jerked his head to the side, violently shaking off Crane’s touch.

‘Give me one good reason why I should.’ Sam opened his mouth but Crane stole his voice before he could give shape to his nameless panic. Lips smudged against his own, unerringly firm but sliding softly with a fluid sensuality that demanded entrance. A tongue insinuated itself along the vulnerable inner surface of his lips and stabbed deeper before Sam could muster anything beyond a shocked noise that came out too much like a whimper.

‘Not nearly good enough.’ Each taunting word vibrated against Sam’s lips, tugged cruelly at the slick flesh as Crane grinned against his mouth. ‘This,’ a large hand pressed down over the traitorous bulge tenting Sam’s trousers, ‘tells me you want it.’ His palm rubbed roughly over the outline of Sam’s erect cock, skimming pulsing shocks of arousal to the surface. Shivering hard, Sam bit back a moan, flushing hotter when his teeth scraped across the wide shape of Crane’s smiling mouth. Crane answered the mistake with a chuckle and a harder nip back at Sam’s lower lip.

‘I said, _stop._ ’ Sam shuddered as Crane’s fingers dipped further down between his legs, groping intimately as though the woven wool fibre of his suit didn’t exist at all.

‘If you want me to stop, just push me away.’ Another biting kiss grazed over Sam’s mouth; Sam twisted his head to the side but Crane’s lips slipped instead against his neck, suckling wetly along his pulsing jugular. ‘You’re the big, serious copper here, aren’t you?’ he whispered, pouring the taunt into his ear. ‘You want me to stop? _Make me._ ’

The low lilt of his voice riding the ghost of breath gusting hot over his neck left Sam trembling at the edge of his will. Tongue and teeth toyed with the thin skin futilely concealing the racing pulse in his neck, scraping over a seldom-touched bundle of nerves that forced a shaky moan from Sam’s tenuous grasp.

‘Make me,’ Crane commanded again, speaking between scraping bites along his throat. ‘Or else I’ll make you beg for it, just like this.’ The groping hand at his groin tightened, finding and stroking the rough shape of his cock through his trousers. The searing echo of want stirred by his touch nearly distracted Sam from the painful twist of his arm as Crane forced his captive hand up behind his back in a sudden move that forced their bodies even closer together.

‘You want this.’ The hard hush of friction tugged another unwilling moan from Sam; horrified, he squeezed his eyes shut, feeling the heat rise in his stubbornly averted face as Crane’s mouth sought access to more sweating skin beneath the collar of his shirt. ‘Even if you can’t stand to look me in eye and admit it…’

Lips latched themselves to the hollow of his throat, suckling hard and reducing Sam to a panting, speechless mess. He shook with bitter frustration as much as arousal, gritted teeth his only defense as Crane twisted him around to press face first into the shelves, their edges laying sharp bites across his chest and thighs.

‘Don’t need to see your face to get what I want anyway,’ Crane snapped cruelly, smothering himself up against Sam’s back. The stab of panic that took him at the unspoken threat, at the unmistakable hardness prodding his clothed arse, melted away at the quick slide of two hands down the front of his trousers. One slipped inside to cradle his cock in the heat of bare flesh as the other worked at his belt and flies, shoving trousers and pants aside until the only thing containing Sam’s arousal was Crane’s hand wrapped tight around him. He took up a punishing stroke that set Sam panting quick, hotly squirming against cool and dry fingers that chafed the sensitive flesh.

‘Desperate, aren’t you?’ Crane’s hand twisted hard from root to tip, squeezed him to the point just before pain. ‘Bet you don’t even care how I take you, don’t care if it hurts, so long as I keep touching you, like this…’ A manicured fingernail, smooth yet sharp, pressed down into the slit of his cock, drawing out the scant fluid pooling there and forcing it to flow as readily as blood from a knife. Sam shuddered, clutched the shelves with a white-knuckled grip, disgusted at the pleasure he could already feel curdling at the base of his spine. The threat of orgasm was rushing fast upon him, too fast to force out a defiant _No_ , too inevitable to indulge that weak and whimpering _please_ choking him from the inside.

‘So wet for it…’ A gentle thumb, a vicious counterpoint to the brisk slide of his palm over his length, spread pre-come slickly sweet over his flushed glans, lapping at him as deliberately as the pointed tongue tracing the edge of his ear. ‘Dirty copper slut…’

In the ragged aftershocks of his orgasm, Sam would harshly convince himself that it was the stimulation of very particular nerve endings and _not_ the whispering words scalding his ear that tipped him over the edge. The lie made it far easier to withstand the pleasure burning through his body, smoldering right down to his fingertips clinging weakly to the shelves as he fought to steady his legs beneath him. Physically and emotionally shaken, Sam could barely muster a groan of protest when Crane’s damp hands closed around his hips and shoved his bunched trousers and pants further down his thighs. The distracting points of teeth scraped over the back of his neck, drowning out the shiver-inducing shuffle of loosening clothing and Crane’s large hands. The breath storming fast in Sam’s lungs had no chance to slow down as the rush of orgasm tripped swiftly over to horror at the hot slide of hard flesh over his bared buttocks.

‘What’re you…’ Sam gasped sharply, one of Crane’s hands tight around his throat, choking off the edge of his words.

‘Shhhh…’ The collar of Crane’s hand pulled him back hard but the full weight of Crane’s body pressed him forward, pinning him tight between the biting shelves and the rut of an unseen cock riding the curve of his arse. A thin veneer of sweat or, Sam thought with a shudder, possibly his own come, eased the slide of Crane’s cock against his skin. The low growl in his ear and the steering hand locked around his hipbone mimed the bestial rhythms of a hard fuck save that Crane made no attempt to shove his erection further down between Sam’s legs. That impersonal mercy unraveled some of Sam’s tight trepidation and loosened his body into Crane’s clutching hands; he allowed exhaustion to slacken his limbs, very nearly inviting the lewd slap of flesh against flesh until fingers seized around his windpipe and Crane shook against his back and thick, fluid heat slicked the infinitesimal space between them with a finality that made Sam flush with shame.

The come streaking his arse cooled as soon as Crane stepped back with a low, satiated sigh. His eyes still shut, Sam fought down a renewed wave of sickness at the twisting downward tug on his suit jacket as Crane unmistakably wiped himself clean on the lining. He cringed in anticipation of a stinging rebuke, perhaps a condescending pat on the shoulder, but the indifferent click of shoes moving away with no further sound was every bit as devastating.

After several steadying inhalations, Sam finally dared to open his eyes and glance over his shoulder. Crane was leaning against his desk, every crisp seam of his suit in perfect order, hooded eyes studying the contents of his humidor. Nothing of his mature dignity betrayed any sign of sordid deeds so recently committed, and Sam, in a delirious moment of shock, wondered whether he had just imagined the last grasping handful of minutes.

Then Crane glanced up at him from beneath his heavy brow bone, and his eyes sparked with so much leering knowledge that Sam shuddered as though feeling the touch of another violation creeping over him. He ducked his head and fumbled for his trousers, mindlessly covering his soiled body and fighting to control his breathing just below the point of hyperventilation. He cinched his belt a notch too tight, felt the constriction all the way through his chest.

‘I hope,’ Crane said, slow and dry, ‘that you found what you were looking for after all, Mr. Tyler.’

He lit a cigarillo as Sam bolted for the door, a billowing acrid smell that had clung to Sam’s skin for days. That dry killing scent followed him everywhere, all the way to this darkened room no less choked with smoke than the corridors Sam had blindly followed in Gene’s wake, from CID to Lost and Found and Annie selecting one plastic bag from a mocking ocean of evidence. More clues than he had ever found in that office search so many years from now.

He took the plastic bag that Annie offered him, turned it in fingers that gradually stopped shaking with careful concentration. ‘Insert for a disc breather,’ he observed numbly. ‘For asthmatics.’

At least he could breathe now. He handed the bag off to Gene with a frown, pulling the pieces together but it still didn’t add up to what he needed.

Gene, meanwhile, had caught up to the same conclusion. ‘There’s a link between those muggings, the counterfeit racket and Crane.’

‘We won’t get him on first-degree murder,’ Sam protested.

‘Yeah, but we can imply a link to manufacture and laundering, which means we could at least get him for accessory to manslaughter.’ But Sam shook his head, frustration welling up from the inside. He couldn’t do this again, he _wouldn’t._

‘That’s not good enough.’

‘Ten years? Good enough for me!’

‘He’ll plea bargain,’ Sam snapped. ‘He’ll get six, he’ll be out in three. He’s got the money to make it happen.’ And possibly the loyalty already, he considered. The memory of Eve’s misplaced love was already strong enough to make Sam shout out his anger even louder. ‘We haven’t stopped him becoming a killer. I need him in for life, Gene.’

But Gene had long since stopped listening, was already walking back out of Lost and Found with the paltry evidence in hand and Annie at his heels. It wasn’t enough, he needed _more_.

‘Are you listening to me? Life!’ He stalked hard on their heels, desperate and quick. He couldn’t let Crane slip away again, not like this.

If it meant keeping Crane off the streets, he would do anything.


	3. Chapter 3

‘Mr. Crane.’

As soon as the words detached themselves from his mouth, Gene knew what he was about to do.

‘I think you need to take a seat somewhere quiet until a doctor takes a look at you.’

Though it took a monstrous effort, Gene forced himself to watch, insides seething full of creeping regret, as Ray and Chris threw Crane up against the filing cabinet, following an order he hadn’t even the balls to speak aloud. He knew the gravity of the decision he had made even if the speech he needed to see it done kept falling out of his grasp.

Not that it mattered anyway, not with Tyler filling in every fumbling gap of him with a zeal that scared the shit out of him.

The job done, he held back, fists clenched at his sides as Ray and Chris dragged Crane kicking and screaming out of CID. A hateful weakness kept him the hell out of it even as Sam stalked forward to shove one last mocking word into Crane’s astonished, anguished face. The blunt points of Gene’s ill-trimmed fingernails bit into the palms of his hands as he held his helpless watch on it all, chilled by anger and almost glad he hadn’t heard exactly what Sam had just said; the last thing he needed was another irrevocable reason to pop him one in his smug, madness-spewing gob.

Once Crane’s bellowing had faded to blood-curdling silence, Gene shook off the paralysis in his legs and crossed to where Sam stood near the door, shoulders rising and falling beneath his leather coat. The lad was still a live wire, something manic sparking in wide eyes that carried just enough self-conscious remorse to keep Gene’s hands from wrapping themselves around his slender throat.

‘I’m gonna round up the press and make a statement,’ he said, giving himself the excuse he needed to escape Sam’s unstable orbit. Then, as an afterthought, ‘Cartwright.’

To the plonk’s credit, Cartwright chased obediently after him even though Gene knew full well she’d have liked nothing more than to stick close to Sam’s side. He let her follow him at an urgent clip until the door to the gents came into view.

‘Go find Phyllis and get her to call the press round soon as she’s done with Crane,’ he instructed numbly. ‘I’ll give that lot their statement outside the station in half an hour or so.’

‘Guv…’

Cartwright poured a multitude of questions into that one imploring syllable, her normally placid eyes a storm of disbelief, relief and a mournful worry that seemed contrarily aimed at Gene himself. Dismissing her unspoken concern with a hard sniff, he leaned the palm of his hand into the gents’ door to signal his intention to get the hell away from her mollycoddling.

‘And make sure you get your clever clogs out there and all,’ he added. ‘Let the journos get an eyeful of your pretty face.’

Whether Cartwright was flattered or indignant at the order, Gene didn’t wait around to find out. He retreated to a stall, kicking down the toilet lid and sinking down with a low sigh, elbows planted heavily on his knees and head falling forward into the palms of his hands.

He ground his thumbs hard into his aching temples, trying to rub out the splinters of guilt piercing through his head. Each contradictory thought stabbed out at the other, making Gene’s nerves ache with the weight of it all.

Thing was, when Sam wasn’t a raving nutter he was still a bloody good detective and he had called it right where his relationship with Crane was concerned. Crane – _Tony_ , he reminded himself sternly – had been a friend, albeit one built on the foundation Sam had so scornfully suspected. What had started out as a purely professional interest in the local gaming establishment had been smoothed out with a courtesy pint at the bar. A short stack of chips had materialized alongside his beer mat after the third visit once Tony had sussed out his fondness for roulette, and soon the visits were less out of concern for the legality of his casino and more in interest of the perks provided. The drinks, the play, the ambience… and Tony, whose backhanders were strangely sweetened by Gene’s inability to sniff out even the slightest hint of wrongdoing on his premises.

Perks without the taint of crime. It had been a rare and good thing, at least until Sam.

With a grimace and a groan, Gene forced himself to sit up from his self-pitying slump, craning his head back to frown at the stained ceiling tiles. He reached into his jacket pocket, fumbling past his flask in search of his cigarettes. Picturing Sam’s disapproving moue whenever he lit up brought a reluctant smile to his lips as he took a long, needful drag of his Players No. 5 and absently scritched the back of his neck.

A rare and good thing indeed, at least until that business with Stephen Warren had changed all the rules. And good riddance to bad rubbish, but of course it had been Sam who brought that change about.

Sam had a knack for that, changing all the rules had taken for granted.

\+ + +

‘It don’t work that way anymore.’ Gene pushed the chips back along the bar, careful not to let his quiet satisfaction ruin the blank expression with which he read Tony’s narrowing eyes, the nervous flick of tongue over his lips.

‘You got something against a bit of courtesy among friends these days?’ he asked lightly, long fingers plucking the uppermost chip from the stack and tumbling it along his knuckles.

‘Nothing wrong with courtesy, Mr. Crane,’ he replied smoothly, pausing for a measured sip of his beer. ‘Bribes, on the other hand…’

Gene shrugged as he shot a sharper, more considering look at Tony, who frowned down at the chips for a thoughtful moment before palming the entire stack into his hand and dropping them down behind the bar.

‘Bribes, Mr. Hunt?’ Tony flashed a boyish grin that made Gene’s insides squirm with an uncomfortable ache not unlike longing. ‘Bribery implies I’ve been doing something wrong in the eyes of the law, and we both know I’ve done nothing of the sort.’

‘And so long as you keep it that way, we’ve nothing to worry about, have we?’

Their gazes locked for a raw, unambiguous moment in which Gene felt full to bursting of all that he was: man and mate, sure, but also copper and pitiless sheriff of Manchester all in one. Understanding made the brightness fade from Tony’s smile, though it lingered gently on his lips.

‘Nothing at all,’ he agreed.

‘Good lad.’ Gene drained his pint and dug into his pockets. ‘How much do I owe you for the drink?’

‘Still nothing.’

Gene frowned. ‘Tony…’

‘What’s become of our fine civilization when a bloke can’t treat his mate to a pint, eh Gene?’

Tony’s large eyes were almost guileless, unerringly friendly in their intent. Still, Gene hesitated, fist clenching deep in his coat pocket.

‘What’s brought this about?’ The smile faded entirely, and Gene was reminded of every reason why he had kept an eye on Tony in the first place when those pale eyes narrowed to a canny squint. ‘Turning down a free pint? That’s not the Gene Hunt I know.’

He stared down at his empty pint glass, drowning his reservations in the shallow puddle of burnished gold at its bottom. The beer still danced pleasantly across his tongue, against his lips.

‘Tell you what,’ he said finally, ‘that was your round. This one’s on me, yeah?’

‘Good man.’ Tony smiled approvingly as he swept away Gene’s empty glass and pulled two fresh pints in its place. ‘Hope you’ll stay on for a few rounds of roulette, even if it is out your own pocket,’ he added with a wink over the taps.

Gene twisted around on his bar stool, casting a speculative glance over the gaming tables. ‘Might do, yeah,’ he said agreeably. ‘Been a good week, I’m feeling lucky.’ Catching the familiar thunk of a full pint landing on the bar, Gene reached blindly back, his fingers slipping unerringly around the cool curve of glass, stuttering as they brushed over knobbly warmth as well. He shot a glance over his shoulder, first confirming the brush of Tony’s fingers over his own before daring to meet the other man’s lazy gaze.

‘I might be feeling lucky too,’ he said, answering the unvoiced question stuck on Gene’s tongue.

‘That so.’ Gene dragged his eyes away from Tony’s parted lips, back down to where their fingers met around the side of his pint, nesting side-to-side and growing slick with condensation.

‘Very much so.’

Tony crooked a finger, drew it damp across Gene’s knuckles. He wondered why the hell he hadn’t moved his hand away yet.

‘Hell of a gamble, Tony.’ Gene tried to make it sound like a warning; by the soft chuckle that answered him, he suspected he had failed.

‘Reckon it’s worth the risk.’ That cool touch trailed to the tip of his middle finger, lingered a spell before slipping mercifully away. ‘Don’t you?’

His abandoned hand tightened around his drink as Gene forced himself to look once more into Crane’s hooded blue eyes, glinting with promise beneath the shadow of his sharp browbone. Every sculpted feature of his unusual face was sharp with youth, younger even than Sam.

 _Sam._ With a shuddering shake of his head, Gene downed a long sip of lager that managed to cool some of the heat that had risen unwelcome in his groin. He could do without that clever and cynical mouth so long as he remembered the sight of softer, indecently pink lips wrapped around the neck of a shared bottle of J &B while they watched the sun rise over the canal. Foolish though it was, the whisky had tasted that much better for having touched Sam’s French-spewing tongue before warming his own cold bones.

That morning after such a dark night had been a step in the right direction; Tony Crane was nothing of the sort.

‘Don’t think my luck would stretch far enough for that and the roulette,’ he had joked lightly instead, tilting his glass to invite Tony to share a toast instead. By the bright chime of Crane’s pint against his own, accompanied by a fleeting rueful smile, Gene could tell the lad wouldn’t be pining his dubious loss for a second. Gene didn’t make DCI by being a gullible fool, and he knew full well that Crane’s offer was about protecting his own arse rather than offering it up freely out of anything like genuine interest. Men like Crane didn’t form attachments to men like him, not without a professional purpose to back it up; they had been friendly, even friends, but they had kept it professional rather than personal. Until…

Until.

With a low, decisive grunt, Gene rose to his feet and kicked up the toilet lid, letting the remains of his cigarette drop into the bowl with a soft hiss. As the stagnant water suffocated that point of fire to nothing, Gene felt his old fortitude smother itself around shame, guilt and all that pointless rubbish in between. A quick glance in the bathroom mirror on his way out was an easy afterthought, largely loosened from any admonitions radiating from his own weary eyes.

No time for self-pity, he decided firmly as he squared his shoulders, straightened his tie and took a deep breath. He had the press waiting for him.

\+ + +

‘Guv?’

Lips pressed thin, Gen watched carefully as Sam edged his office door open with tentative fingertips. The swagger with which Sam tended to claim Gene’s space by virtue of having simply shown up was conspicuously absent as he crept to an uncertain stop far from Gene’s desk, evasive eyes flickering down to the file in his hands.

The sight of paperwork, more than anything, convinced Gene that Sam had not come here to apologize.

‘Whatever it is you’ve got there, be quick about it.’ Dropping the sports pages down over his lap, Gene pinched the bridge of his nose. ‘Beer o’clock should’ve happened three hours ago and I’m thirsty.’

‘It’s just gone five,’ Sam pointed out slowly.

‘That’s what I just said, isn’t it?’ Gene asked flatly. ‘Spit it out already, Tyler.’

Sam gaped at him, mouth moving soundlessly before he shook his head and finally moved close enough to the desk to throw down the file in his hands. ‘Found our new DC.’

‘Oh aye?’ Curiosity piqued despite his foul mood, Gene slid his feet off the desk and leaned over, flipping the file folder open. He stared, blinked, let loose a wary groan. ‘You’ve got to be joking me.’

‘Was your idea first.’

Gene looked up in disbelief; the tosser really was grinning and all. ‘I never did.’

‘Couple days ago, back in the lift. Remember?’

He did, now. ‘Nope.’

Sam rolled his eyes. ‘Even if you hadn’t said it first, she’s the best choice for the job. By far the most motivated, and she did good work on this last case.’ He raised an eyebrow. ‘You _do_ remember saying as much to the press not half an hour ago, right?’

Choosing not to answer, Gene blew out a slow breath and dropped his gaze back down to WPC Cartwright’s personnel file. _Nancy Drew couldn’t hold a candle._ His exact words, and at the most honest core of him Gene knew he wouldn’t take them back for the world. Smart lass, Cartwright.

‘You’re serious, aren’t you?’ Slapping the folder shut again, he pushed it across the desk towards Sam. ‘Slip of a girl like that… the men would eat her alive. Never mind what the rest of the Constabulary would say about it.’ Gene sniffed and kicked his feet back up on his desk. ‘Litton’ll have a field day when he finds out.’

‘Don’t tell me you give a toss what the RCS boys have to say about it.’ Sam straightened defensively, chin jutting upward to fight a battle he didn’t know he had already won. ‘Once Annie’s on the team, we’ll be clearing up cases left, right and centre. _Then_ you can tell Litton where to shove his chauvinistic attitude.’

‘Hmn.’ There was no denying the appeal of flaunting that bit of clever skirt in Litton’s face and Gene knew Cartwright would be good for it. But knowing didn’t do anything to fill the hollow ache throbbing at his insides.

‘Fine.’ He waved a hand dismissively at the file. ‘Go tell Nancy Drew the good news and get her arse up here. I’ll crack a bottle of the good stuff to keep the lads steady.’

‘Cheers, Guv.’ Something apprehensive still pulled taut at Sam’s mouth as he took back Cartwright’s file; he slapped it absently against his other hand, drew in a hard noseful of air. ‘Gene…’

He stopped Sam with a quelling glare. ‘Sam,’ he replied shortly, eyes narrowing. ‘Don’t push your luck. Not now. Not today.’

Gene offered no further explanation, and Sam had the good sense for once not to ask for one. He turned away with a stiff nod, no doubt mindless to the lingering eye Gene cast down to the pert curve of his arse as he disappeared through the door.

Left alone with that sick and empty feeling spreading up through his chest, Gene lurched to his feet, filling the unpleasant echo with the heavy clomp of his feet around the desk to the filing cabinet. Harry had passed along a single malt that would suit the occasion nicely – it was a nice one, but not precious and most important of all, Gene hadn’t paid for it.

He thumbed the cork’s foil with a frown, forcing himself to read the label from top to bottom, front to back, anything to drive out the images crowding the front of his mind. Cartwright would be ecstatic, he knew, all bright blue eyes and apple cheeks high with colour; she would throw her arms around Sam when he gave her the news and Sam, the soft nancy, would hug her back and share in her laughter and smile even brighter, bright enough that the insides of Gene’s eyelids burned to see it.

Eyes snapping open, he gave his head a hard shake and spitefully tore the foil from the bottle. If Sam got to have the girl, the least Gene deserved in return was the first dram before the rest of the whisky was tainted by a celebration of which he wanted no part at all.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning for dub-con sexual content in this chapter.

Dropping the phone into its cradle with unnecessary force, Sam slumped down into his desk chair and rubbed his thumb anxiously over his lip as though to erase a bad taste that had crept into his mouth and down his throat.

Any thought of Tony Crane had grown so distant, so beautifully infinitesimal like a grain of sand he could lose between his fingertips, that he hadn’t even recognized the name of the psychiatric hospital when Dr. Thackeray had politely introduced himself over the phone.

 _‘From Green Lake Asylum.’_ A cold stone of dread had lodged itself in Sam’s throat at the introduction, convinced as he was that Gene had finally decided to turn him in to the nuthouse before common sense took over. If he was about to be hauled off in a straitjacket, Sam doubted anyone would do him the courtesy of a phone call first.

He had seen for himself now exactly how this business was done.

 _‘I’m calling concerning one of our more recent arrivals… a troubling case, but remarkably cogent… He has asked for you by name, on several occasions…’_

Not for the first time, Sam allowed the trickle of regret at the back of his mind to flood his thoughts with muddy waters. _Remarkably cogent_ … that wasn’t surprising, given that Crane had been one of the sharpest, most devious bastards he had ever known. Criminal, yes, but not criminally insane by a long shot. Sam forced himself to dwell on that truth for a guilt-ridden moment: the idea of that deft mind pinned down behind the walls of some backward mental institution, starving for stimulation and grasping at straws. Was it worse, he wondered, than being forced to live in a painfully real world where all felt certain save for one’s own mind?

 _‘You’re not obliged to do this, of course… but we have great hopes for Mr. Crane’s recovery and I do believe we could speed things along quite nicely with a spot of sensible conversation.’_

That anyone in this time and place would call on Sam to provide this _sensible conversation_ amused him far more than was, in a word, sane. Even as he had smoothly noted down the time and directions and exchanged farewell pleasantries with Dr. Thackeray, a reckless bubble of laughter threatened to erupt from his belly – a roiling twist of irrational delight that turned to sickness as soon as he had hung up the phone.

Choking down the dueling urges to giggle or retch, Sam slouched back in his chair and, after a surreptitious glance around CID, slid open the topmost drawer of his desk, eyes slanting sideways to glimpse the slip of paper tucked under the corner of a stack of files. The four letters and four numbers of the puzzle were still there, preserved in his messily urgent scrawl.

In a way, this most recent call felt every bit as significant as that unnamed voice on the line, though for a reason he couldn’t quite identify. A visit with Tony Crane offered no calmly stated promises to take him home; on the contrary, following this road to some mental hospital on the outskirts of Manchester could be a step in the wrong direction, a complication that would only serve to feed the delusion of this place.

That delusion, however, was sufficiently starved for validation in Sam’s confused mind. He had heeded the steady sound of that voice from Hyde with a wary eye on Annie, on Chris and Ray and the rest of the team that he already knew he would miss if he ever got home. The guilt had pricked him sharper still when Gene had wordlessly topped up his drink moments after he had frantically retrieved the number of his caller from the operator. Sam had sensed the distance in him, the way Gene had smiled more with his swagger than with his mouth but with warmth enough to surpass the real burn of whisky on his tongue.

In that clink of unwashed office glasses, Sam had seen reason enough to discard the slip of paper he now rubbed thoughtfully between his fingertips. Gene was made of things more physical than numbers on a page and level words on the telephone; he was an enticement that enlarged itself in Sam’s imagination far beyond the shared drinks and electric tension. The temptations that made Sam linger were rich with both extremes; he wanted the slow heady burn of whisky as much as the violent adrenaline that he knew lurked beneath Gene’s carefully callous exterior.

He wanted more, possibly, than Gene would ever be willing to offer.

With a silent sigh, he safely tucked the telephone number back into place and slid the drawer closed. For now, at least.

\+ + +

Green Lake answered the very worst of Sam’s grim imaginings of what a psychiatric institution of the seventies would be with such haunting accuracy that its physicality did little to make his place in time seem remotely real. Only a comatose mind could come up with this hulking Edwardian monster crouching like a lonely giant on the desolation of the Lancastrian countryside.

Its guts were scarcely better than its stone skin, even with the modernized overlay of laminate floors and fluorescent lights in corridors that revealed the wear of decades in an unforgiving glow. The sounds of the place were muted, the doctors and nurses and orderlies surprisingly patient and polite, but something about Green Lake seeped its way into Sam with an anxious chill as he followed a too-young woman’s encouraging directions through a wide, high-windowed visitors lounge to one anonymous folding table among many. He took his time at first, examining each white-clad patient one at a time in search of some sickly recognition – he could still feel Askey’s uneven breath on his cheek, could still see the backward empathy in his wild eyes – until a turn of his head drew his eye straight to that strikingly familiar face and the rest of the room melted away into insignificance.

 _‘He just needs some reassurance.’_ The psychiatrist’s kindly advice rang once more through his head as he approached on slow, considering feet. _‘A few home truths, that’s all.’_

Truths. Sam settled into the hard plastic chair facing Crane, smiling into his narrowed stare.

He could do truth.

‘Thirty-one years from now,’ he began, forcibly calm, ‘you assaulted me after a routine search at your office.’

Crane’s angular features twitched.

‘I had just made Chief Inspector,’ he pressed on, relishing the anxiety growing in Crane’s eyes, ‘and I was going to show everyone upstairs exactly how good I was by finally arresting you and making it stick.’

‘That much, I can believe.’ His calm recovered, Crane leaned back in his chair and fixed Sam with a flat frown. ‘At least, it sounds familiar enough.’

‘It should,’ he insisted. ‘You pushed me up against your bookshelves and you raped me.’

If Crane was shocked, the mild quirk of his eyebrow didn’t reveal as much. ‘What, like you raped me during one of your little inquiries not so long ago?’ he asked dryly.

Sam flushed. ‘I didn’t rape you.’

‘You threw me down over my desk,’ Crane recalled distantly. ‘You made a mess of my papers.’

‘You made a mess of my suit.’ Despite his best effort at control, his hands began to shake; he clasped them tightly together on the table and leaned inward. ‘I couldn’t bring myself to wear it again after that.’

‘You tore my shirt open so quickly that I lost several buttons.’ Rather than appearing disturbed, Crane related each fact with an indifferent sort of amusement that made Sam’s heart pound louder in his head. ‘Had a hell of a time explaining that one to my Eve.’

‘It’s nothing she won’t have seen before,’ he snapped. ‘You wanted it.’ Sam hated the words as soon as they left his mouth, hated the monster they implicated beneath his love of law. ‘You could’ve said no. You didn’t.’

‘Did you?’

Sam drew backward, reeling as though Crane had slapped him. He bit down hard on his lower lip, stared down at his clasped hands: white-knuckled, and shaking still.

‘I take it that’s a no.’ With a falsely sympathetic sigh, Crane tilted his head to the side. ‘Why are you here, Inspector?’

He frowned, nonplussed. ‘You asked to see me.’

Crane shook his head. ‘Thackeray asked you to see me. I had nowt to do with it.’

‘He said you’ve been talking about me.’

‘Of course I have. What’ve I got to talk to a quack about if not the bent madman of a copper who told a pack of lies to get me in here in the first place?’

Sam glanced anxiously over his shoulder but the nearest orderly was neglectful miles away, with no doctors whatsoever to be found. ‘I’m _not_ mad,’ he insisted in a tight whisper, glaring back into Crane’s distantly amused face.

‘Of course not,’ he sighed. ‘With a reaction like that, whomever would think you were?’ For the first time since Sam had sat down, Crane smiled, a slow wide thing that swallowed up the last of Sam’s faltering stoicism. ‘Face it, Inspector, you’re rattling louder than a boxful of spanners. Should I call my keepers over for you right now?’

‘Piss off.’ But he threw another wary glance sideways, keeping track of the orderly. He appeared to be coming nearer their table.

‘Maybe we could share a room.’ A delighted malice glowed from behind Crane’s eyes. ‘What did you say I did to you? You know, _in the future?_ Oh, yes… haven’t got any bookshelves in my little room but I’m sure we could–’

‘I’m not interested,’ Sam interrupted sharply.

‘You were before.’

‘It was a mistake.’ Biting his tongue, Sam crossed his arms and continued to track the orderly with narrowed eyes. He refused to apologize; he knew what apologies cost in the eye of the law.

‘Fine.’ Crane sniffed loudly. ‘This is why I liked Gene better,’ he muttered, and Sam’s ears pricked like a bloodhound’s.

‘What’s that about Gene?’

‘Said I liked him,’ he repeated in a slow, impatient drone. ‘What’s wrong, Inspector? Lost your hearing as well as your marbles?’

‘No, no, you said you liked him _better_.’ Heart pounding, Sam leaned in again, forcing Crane’s indifferent gaze. ‘Why would you compare us like that?’

Crane shrugged. ‘Both coppers, aren’t you?’ He inflected the question with a thin dose of doubt, but Sam shook his head past it and pushed forward.

‘I think it’s more than that.’

‘You’re both _bent_ coppers,’ he elaborated sneeringly.

Sam slumped back in his uncomfortable chair, chewing on his thumb as he considered the implacable wall before him. There was every likelihood that Crane was referring to his and Gene’s complicity in Crane’s incarceration but somehow he suspected there was some other motivation behind his words.

‘You know where he keeps his lighter,’ he murmured finally.

‘Don’t you?’

‘Do now, I suppose.’ Irritation surged messily through Sam’s gut, a gnawing jealousy of things he didn’t dare to name. ‘What I don’t know is how you came to know that in the first place.’

‘Do you know where I keep my lighter, Inspector?’

‘Why should I?’ Sam frowned at the question, anger spiking at the narrowed knifepoint glint in Crane’s eye, the stabbing edge of his smile.

‘I think you do. You’re a detective, aren’t you?’

Sam scowled instinctively but somewhere in the back of his mind the gears were already turning, replaying through a memory that was too recent to have lost its visceral colour. Lurid polyester print rippled loud between his clenching fingers, a slippery skin torn away and crashed to the ground like so much water.

‘Not your breast pocket,’ he murmured unconsciously, and Crane’s smile widened.

‘Not bad so far…’ he praised softly, the words distant against the scene unraveling itself in Sam’s mind. The abrasive edge of a leather belt cut into the joints of his fingers, anchoring thumbs that caught the pockets of trousers, slick polyester again giving so little resistance. There was scarcely anything between Sam’s hands and the heat of Crane’s hipbones and thighs, nothing save the glance of a cold metal weight that had grazed his knuckles.

‘Left trousers pocket.’ The words fell leaden and dull from Sam’s mouth, echoing the soft thud of Crane’s Zippo when it had fallen from loosened trousers and hit the carpet. He stared, aghast, into Crane’s smug face. ‘But… Gene, how do you know…’

Crane tsked softly, shook his head. ‘Now _that_ , Mr. Tyler, would be too close to telling,’ he scolded, but all Sam heard was the implication riding hard on the evidence and memories building in his mind.

‘You…’ He closed his eyes, scarcely able to give the impossible idea form with his voice. ‘You, and Gene…’

‘Does your DCI know about us?’ Crane interrupted sharply, and Sam snapped his eyes open with a shudder of disgust.

‘There is no _us_.’

‘Maybe not,’ he agreed, dripping with a chilling sarcasm. ‘Let me rephrase the question, then. Does Gene Hunt know that you forced yourself on me during your twisted little vendetta of an investigation?’

Sam flushed with both shame and anger. ‘I didn’t–’

‘Does. He. Know.’

Lips pressed thin, Sam cast a wary glance around the room before forcing himself to confront Crane’s heavy glare and waiting question. ‘No,’ he admitted finally. ‘No, of course he doesn’t.’

‘You don’t want him to know.’

‘He wouldn’t want to know,’ Sam corrected firmly. He looked away, chewed hard on his lower lip; the very idea of Gene finding out what he had done didn’t bear thinking about.

‘You’ve got your dark little secret,’ Crane said, low and silken with savage delight. ‘And maybe your DCI has his own. That’s all you need to know.’

Sam squinted back at Crane from the corner of his eye. His heart thumped erratically in his chest, suffocating Sam with nausea and doubt. His skin crawled with cold, his palms were itchy with sweat, yet Crane merely smiled blandly back.

‘All you need to know.’ Crane leaned in, as though to examine Sam’s panic from a different angle. ‘Isn’t that enough?’

‘No.’ Sam pushed to his feet, shaking off a lurch of light-headedness as he did so. ‘Whatever it is you’re hiding from me, I will find it out.’

‘Maybe you will,’ Crane agreed easily. ‘But don’t go thinking you can go digging where Gene Hunt doesn’t want you without giving up a few secrets of your own along the way.’

An ugly, errant voice in the back of Sam’s mind whispered its agreement but damned if he was going to admit as much out loud. With a parting glare, Sam stalked away, through the lounge and down the corridor and stairs, evading the duty nurse’s gentle questioning with a grimacing shake of his head. She let him go with a sad smile as though she understood the cause of Sam’s distress, as though she had the slightest chance in hell of knowing the things that churned Sam’s guts but he was grateful for her ignorance as he escaped to the relative safety of the borrowed police pool car waiting in the lot outside.

He sagged over the steering wheel, taking in gasping mouthfuls of stale air as he fumbled the key into the ignition. A nameless fear was paralyzing his reflexes, kept him from completing his retreat from the asylum that still loomed large over his too-small car when escape would only throw him back into the growing conundrum that was Gene. If Gene ever found out what he had done to Crane… no, what he had done _with_ Crane because he knew full well that Crane could take care of himself, knew how quick he was to take control whenever he wanted it.

 _I can see very well  
There’s a boat on the reef with a broken back  
And I can see it very well…_

‘No,’ he murmured, pressing his brow against the steering wheel, eyes squeezed defensively shut. ‘No, no…’ He didn’t dare to wonder whether the subdued first lines of song crackling through the radio were coma or chance. It didn’t matter, he didn’t want to hear the memory now, didn’t want to go back…

Sam shivered with the skin-crawling knowledge of the other man’s strength, feeling the ghost of his hands on his wrist, his neck, his cock. Crane’s sexual aggression of that isolated afternoon had returned to haunt Sam from that first glimpse of Crane as he was in this time. It was impossible to separate the youthful and charming Tony Crane from all the sadistic power he had poured out upon Sam’s helpless body in his hospital bed, not when he had felt every piercing violence, every sinister touch reverberating through space and time, riding stealthily on every whispering taunt that had echoed through his head…

‘Inspector Tyler.’ Crane drawled out the greeting slowly, guarded gaze measuring Sam where he stood just beyond the tacky threshold of his office’s beaded curtain. ‘To what do I owe this unexpected pleasure?’

The honest answer stuck on Sam’s tongue, caught somewhere between Eve’s blindly fervent faith in this man and Annie’s complete lack of faith in Sam himself. If only they hadn’t been so easily hoodwinked by Crane’s charming smiles and lipservice to the law; if only they had shown the slightest hint of doubt, Sam may have been able to let it go for now, to patiently wait for the truth to dawn upon them both. Instead, Eve had sneered disdainfully at his warnings and Annie had walked away in a huff of exasperation, leaving him on his own, as always, haunted by the things that he alone knew.

‘This isn’t my idea of a pleasure, Mr. Crane,’ he snapped shortly, contemptuous of those wide, mock-innocent eyes. The Tony Crane he knew was stronger than this one, with blue eyes gone narrow and cold with age to match the hardened power of his body, but Sam could see the same monster lurking inside this youthful seedling of a man.

He could still feel his hands moving beneath the sheets of his hospital bed.

‘Then perhaps you shouldn’t have come.’ Startled at the interruption of Crane’s voice upon the crawling sensations of his skin, Sam jerked his chin upright, throat tightening against a lurch of acidic nausea.

‘Does it bother you that I have?’ Sam forced himself to advance deeper into Crane’s lurid lair, one step at a time. The last time he had been in this room, he had backed away from Crane, wild panic moving his skittish legs; he wouldn’t make the same cowardly mistake twice. ‘You don’t like me, do you?’

‘If that were the case, I’d have to say that the feeling seems to be mutual.’ Looking up from his languid sprawl behind his desk, booted feet propped up on its corner, Crane pursed his lips thoughtfully. ‘I neither like nor dislike you, Inspector, but I do know that you’re terrified of me, and I’d really like to know why.’

‘I’m not afraid of you,’ Sam protested. It was almost the truth; no matter the man he would become, this younger Crane was too relaxed, utterly unguarded. ‘I know you too well to be afraid of you anymore,’ he said, leaning in and resting his knuckles heavily on the desk between them, affecting a posture not unlike Gene during an interrogation. ‘Right now, I reckon I know you far better than you know yourself.’

‘Is that so?’ A flicker of something like genuine curiosity shone in Crane’s leveled gaze, nearly startling Sam with such shocking honesty. He was so young. ‘Would you care to enlighten me?’

Sam tilted his head in a nod as he considered where best to start. ‘You do love Eve,’ he acknowledged first. ‘At first, you may have been getting off on how much it riled your family and your business acquaintances to see you out on the town with a black woman on your arm. You liked the attention and the notoriety well enough, but you didn’t expect to fall in love with her as hard as you have.’ He nodded his satisfaction at the leaden surprise in Crane’s face. ‘And now you know how smart she is, what a great mind she has for business, you can’t imagine life without her. You…’ Distracted by the sordid flash of a crumpled body that bloomed unbidden in his mind, Sam swallowed hard and shook his head. ‘You would do anything to make sure she never leaves you,’ he finished hoarsely. ‘Anything.’

Crane gaped up at him, mouthing soundlessly as though caught in the work of mentally untangling his advantage from Sam’s momentary loss of control. ‘You make that sound like a bad thing,’ he said hesitantly, brows furrowed in a frown.

‘It’s a bad thing because you’re a bad man, Tony,’ Sam explained patiently, eyes narrowing. ‘You love, sure, but you also squander Eve’s generosity, time and time again. You want to strut about town showing the world how damn progressive you are, but you’re still so ashamed of yourself that you keep a great bloody chunk of your life hidden away from view. And not very well at that,’ he tutted, all false sympathy at Crane’s visible confusion.

‘I’m afraid you’ve lost me there,’ he said slowly.

‘Eve knows,’ he pressed on. Frustration and simple, ugly malice made Sam push up from the desk and stalk around its sharp edges to stand alongside Crane’s propped feet. ‘She’s been very understanding of your predilections, hasn’t she?’

‘What _predilections_ are you referring to?’

Heart bursting with bestial spite, Sam didn’t answer with words. Instead, he closed a hand around Crane’s denim-clad shin, just above the ridge of his boot shaft. The touch elicited surprisingly little reaction in itself, but Crane’s eyes widened almost comically as Sam dragged his hand heavily upward, wandering from calf to bony kneecap and nestling deep in the warm seam of his neatly pressed thighs. He stopped well shy of groping Crane’s crotch but the other man flailed backward in his chair as though Sam had done something infinitely worse.

‘Inspector Tyler,’ he blurted out, and there was something coldly forbidding in his voice that reminded Sam too sharply of Crane’s older self but he let the spiking fear drive him onward rather than away. He crowded in tight between Crane’s sprawling legs as they hit the ground, leaning down with his hands braced high on Crane’s thighs.

‘I’m talking about _this_ ,’ he hissed, eyes flicking rapidly between Crane’s startled eyes and shocked, parted lips. ‘It’s not just women like Eve that do it for you. Am I right?’

Sam raked his thumbs up and down the rough inseam of Crane’s trousers as he studied the other man’s reactions. There was an unmistakable swell of arousal in his lap that the tight jeans could never conceal, but his face remained a study in barely contained astonishment. His throat bobbed on a long swallow, Crane’s sole outward sign of movement as he struggled for speech.

‘As flattered as I am, Inspector,’ he managed finally, admirably cool despite the flush rising across his chest beneath the low unbuttoning of his shirt, ‘I think you’re more than a little mistaken. You’re really not my type at all.’

‘That’s not what you’ve said before.’ A boldness that Sam could barely recognize slipped his right hand into Crane’s lap, finding and squeezing the erection he knew he would find there. ‘Really, Tony, still in denial, are you?’ He squinted thoughtfully as Crane licked his dry lips, disturbed by the calculation he could see flitting across that pale blue gaze. ‘Or…’ His eyes widened. ‘Is it that you don’t even know it yet? You haven’t even tried this before?’

Crane frowned up at him, unmoved to either denial or confession.

‘Am I your first?’ A delighted, malicious grin pulled hard at Sam’s mouth. ‘Am I the first man to touch you like this?’ He rolled his palm along the hard ridge of Crane’s cock, reveling in the other man’s reflexive squirming in his chair, even if no sound escaped his tight-pressed lips.

‘Don’t worry, Tony,’ he said softly. ‘I can show you how it goes. I’ll show you exactly how you like it.’ He snarled his fingers behind Crane’s belt, caught a second handful of his shirt and hauled him to his feet with a forceful yank that tore several buttons loose from their threads. The offensively patterned shirt was already ruined, so Sam saw no harm in stripping it away, baring tense shoulders and leaden arms. Crane was a dead, unresponsive weight pressed between his body and the desk, but something in his mute protest only served to entice the lust that sparked with venomous speed in Sam’s bloodstream.

‘Just think of this as me returning the favour,’ he growled as he pushed Crane onto his desk. Contrary to reason, Crane fell easily enough across the mess of his own papers but the icy disdain in his gaze kept Sam cautious enough to climb up after him and securely straddle his thighs as his shaking fingers clumsily unfastened Crane’s belt and flies. If he delayed too long he would lose his nerve, and damned if Sam wanted to tease this out the way Crane had done him, so many years from now. Focused as he was on the struggle of following through on his irrational threat, the even drone of Crane’s voice caught Sam off guard, as though he had forgotten that there was a whole human being laid out between his legs.

‘Does your DCI know about you?’

Sam stared, incredulous, into Crane’s sharply questioning eyes. ‘Know what?’ he asked impatiently, already discomfited by the slow grin creeping across the other man’s wide mouth.

‘Know that you’re a poof.’

The slur dropped from Crane’s leering lips with a force that set Sam bristling with indignation. ‘Does he know _you’re_ a poof?’ he sneered back. Hot, smooth skin brushed the backs of his fingers, and Sam glanced down with a wry smirk at the pale cock jutting out from Crane’s opened trousers and into his waiting hands. ‘Bet he’d be less keen to protect you if he knew about this,’ he said darkly, taking Crane into his hand and teasing his erection to full hardness with next to no effort at all.

‘Bet he’d be less keen on your bullshit if he knew about this,’ Crane retorted. A tight twist of Sam’s hand stabbed the white points of his teeth into his lower lip with a subdued shudder. ‘Bet he’d want nowt to do with you if he could see you right now.’

‘Shut it.’ Perversely, Sam jerked his hand faster; he had seen the weakness fall across Crane’s face and he wanted to see it again.

‘You’re enjoying this even more than you think I am.’ With a squirming twist of his shoulders, Crane darted a arm down between their bodies and Sam twitched hard at the sudden snare of strange fingers between his spread legs, finding the weight of his own arousal with painful accuracy. ‘Is this why you hate me so much?’ Crane asked, sickly sweet. ‘Is it because your cock can’t get enough of me?’

‘Don’t touch me.’ Sam beat his arm away fiercely, gasped sharply as Crane’s other hand swept up in retaliation and seized him by the throat. The biting heel of his hand against his windpipe threw Sam swiftly forward through time, nailed his entire body up against phantom shelves. He helplessly followed as Crane dragged him further down; from this dangerously close, the heat of Crane’s breath seared his jaw.

‘Thing is,’ he whispered, low and harsh, ‘I don’t think you have the balls to take this any further than a dirty grope. I think you’re bluffing.’

With a burst of anger, Sam batted his hand aside again, wrenching out of his grasp but still leaning in so close. ‘Like hell I am,’ he spat spitefully.

‘You’re still terrified of me.’ One of Crane’s claw-like hands flew for him again, but Sam caught it in advance of any touch, knocked it aside but the second landed beyond his field of vision. Pain exploded through his ribcage with a force that stole his breath and left blind rage in its wake. He struck before thought, bared his teeth at the satisfying crack of flesh beneath his hand and felt his jaw rattle with a blow that threw him sideways, off the desk and to the floor in a blind tangle of limbs that followed him, all thighs and grasping fingers, all the way down to the floor.

Though Sam managed to end up largely on top of the other man, Crane took another swing for him and Sam reacted with the quicksilver reflexes he had lacked before, catching a bony wrist in a steel grip whilst his other hand grasped blindly for the handcuffs at his belt. Too often, in the weeks and months after that shame-filled tryst so many years from now, Sam had berated himself for never having reached for the cuffs waiting on his hip. That could have ended this before it had a chance to begin, but from the first click of the cuff around Crane’s fine-boned wrist, Sam knew by the surge of heat throbbing in his groin that this was far from over. Tony Crane in handcuffs felt just, felt right, something he had waited years to see done.

‘Typical copper, hiding behind his badge and shiny toys.’ A cruel light danced behind Crane’s eyes, glinting as sharp and bright as the steel holding his wrist. ‘What’s wrong, Inspector, afraid to take me on man to man?’

‘Not how it looks from here.’ Yanking hard at the other end of the cuffs, Sam tugged Crane sideways and swiftly cuffed his hands securely behind his back, just above the slipped waist of his trousers. The job already started, Sam shoved them the rest of the way down, over the pale curve of his arse and down his lean thighs, letting the bunched fabric hobble him at the knees.

He recoiled as soon as it was done, crippled by horror-struck lust as he took in the sight of what he had made. Curled near-fetal and handcuffed, Crane looked nothing like the aggressor Sam had fought to subdue, long limbs held captive and arse thrust upward in lewd invitation. Reducing Crane to this should be good enough, Sam reasoned desperately, breathing heavily as his eyes tracked feverishly along the taut muscles of his twisted torso to where the dark-haired head lay defeated against the carpet. Defeated, he repeated firmly, no matter the look Crane shot at him from the corner of his eye.

‘What’s wrong, Inspector?’ he drawled lazily. ‘Misplaced your truncheon?’

Speechless, Sam looked pointedly aside, hands clenching helplessly at his sides.

‘You can borrow mine, if you prefer.’ His eyes snapped open at the rustle of movement between his legs. Crane was squirming onto his side, hips rolling to reveal the cock jutting thick and full from his groin. ‘Go on, show me how it’s done… I bet it’d fill up that pretty mouth of yours very nicely…’

At first, flipping Crane violently over onto his front again was a desperate necessity; he needed to get that darkly flushed cock out of sight, needed to escape those leering lips and piercingly blue eyes. He needed to hide, so Crane wouldn’t be able to watch when Sam drew his own aching cock from his trousers and fisted himself at a punishing pace. With his eyes screwed shut, he could pretend this was all some sick hallucination playing out in the confines of his hospital bed, if not for the unrelenting lilt of Crane’s voice at the edge of his hearing.

‘Oh, yes… you want my cock, don’t you?’ Sam drew a sharp, frustrated breath through his clenched teeth. ‘Get me all wet, stuff yourself full of it, that bitchy mouth and that tight arse of yours…’

An involuntary sound, something damning between a growl and a whine, scraped itself loose from Sam’s throat like the final warning of a dying animal.

‘That’s what I’d do, if our places were reversed,’ Crane promised, throaty and low. ‘If I had you like this, I’d split you open…’

Sam’s grip on his arousal slipped, left him fumbling blind in a miasma of white heat and snarling fingertips and hoarse cries and by the time he found himself again, the squeeze of flesh around his cock was tighter than his hand, more terrible than nothing at all. His hips worked with a will beyond his own, driving fast into the body that arched beneath him, to escape or to seek its own release Sam would never know nor care to know. All he knew was wound up tight and unfathomable in the swell of sensation sweeping up his body, racing just beneath the skin and exploding in a roar that deafened him to all but the pounding of his blood in his ears and deeper down in his sorely spent cock.

If it weren’t for the slick mess making him slip softly from the grip of Crane’s arse, Sam would have doubted that he had reached orgasm at all; he felt none of the satiety of release, only a feverish horror that trembled through every tensed sinew of his body. However much he ached, Sam held himself at a cautious remove from the body beneath him, perilously propped on hands and knees as Crane shifted languidly against the carpet. The sideways roll of his hip seared the inside of Sam’s thigh, made him startle back onto his haunches as Crane twisted to face him. His cock, Sam noted through rapidly blurring eyes, was still hard.

‘If you’re not going to finish what you started,’ Crane said, a rough edge to his languorous tone, ‘maybe you could see about removing the cuffs?’

‘Don’t see why I should,’ he snapped impulsively, foolish though it was to pretend he could leave them on indefinitely. That was impossible, but still he cringed from freeing Crane when it would feel too much like a conciliatory gesture, scarcely able to imagine what the other man might yet do with his hands free.

The exaggerated thoughtfulness that furrowed Crane’s brow did nothing to ease Sam’s growing apprehension. ‘Well, I suppose if you left me like this, someone would work me loose eventually,’ he reasoned, slow and deliberate. ‘Maybe even someone who could find your fingerprints on these,’ he added, rattling his wrists in illustration of the damning evidence. ‘Your fingerprints on more than these, I reckon,’ he added with a hint of a wink. ‘More than fingerprints, come to think on it.’

Sam swayed, unsteady as though the floor had dropped from beneath his knees.

‘The key, Inspector.’

His hands shook so hard it took several attempts to slip the tiny key into the lock, far more difficult than forcing himself into Crane’s unprepared body. Panic nearly took him again at the thought but Sam stifled it for now, squinting doggedly at his task until he had cuffs and key tucked safely away again. Not that their removal from the scene did anything to diminish the lurid sight of Crane half-naked, slick with sex and all framed within the limits of Sam’s thighs.

He lurched unsteadily to his feet, felt the movement of cool air against his wet cock and flushed angrily as he fumbled at his trousers. A low snigger drifted at the edge of Sam’s hearing but he refused to look at Crane again, he was already stumbling up the stairs in uneven bounds, two, one, three, two more until he found a fire exit and burst into the shock of outside.

It was still daytime, the sun high in the sky as though scarcely gone noon.

Even now, under what he supposed was the same sun baking the inside of his car, Sam shuddered down the urge to vomit. He could recognize now what had blurred past him then in his reprehensible bloodlust, the way Crane had opened around his fingers, his cock – nothing like a virgin at all. He remembered the hard and knowing light in Crane’s eyes, the dare behind the defiance that had driven Sam onward one irretrievable step at a time. Only now, in hindsight, did Sam see something malicious and deliberate in that watchful gaze.

He had mocked Crane with the assumption that Sam had been his first man. Only now did he begin to wonder if that wasn’t truly the case.

Only now, with Crane’s enigmatic comments about Gene reverberating against that memory, did Sam begin to wonder…. but no, it was impossible, the very idea was laughable, except for the part where Sam didn’t feel like laughing at all.

Sam braced his shoulders upright against the driver’s seat and shifted out of park. He cast an anxious glance back at Green Lake as its foreboding girth diminished in the rearview mirror, wishing that it would be his last visit even as he knew he would return soon enough.

Over the static-charged radio waves, the song reached its scalding crescendo in a burst of sound that strained the limits of the car’s tinny speakers.

 _Is the nightmare black or are the windows painted?  
Will they come again next week, can my mind really take it?_

Jaw grimly set, Sam turned the volume up louder for the chorus and drove away.


	5. Chapter 5

‘Number eleven, black.’

Gene’s jaw twitched in a listless attempt at a frown as the croupier swept the scant scattering of chips from the felt, including the two Gene had half-heartedly wagered on red. Running a rough thumb over the edge of the small stack nested in his palm, he counted out the loss of more than half his initial stake and knew he would do well to walk away before he blew the rest on this useless diversion. He should cash out, get the hell back to the station, make sure his men were doing their jobs fit to keep Harry and the press placated.

 _Leave Tony Crane be,_ he had snapped impatiently at Sam. Shame Gene couldn’t follow his own ruddy advice; the more distance he could carve between Tony and this investigation, the better it would be for everyone concerned. Sam didn’t need any more excuses to sink his teeth into this casino and shake it like a rabid dog until something fell out to support his mad suspicions. This had already spiraled far beyond their usual differences of opinion and rapidly degenerated into a paranoid witch-hunt that, if Gene was being completely honest with himself, had him far more worried for Sam than for Tony or himself.

For one thing, it wasn’t like Sam to show up as late as he had this afternoon with no explanation for his whereabouts.

‘Place your bets.’ The croupier droned indifferently at the edge of his hearing. Unthinkingly, Gene dropped two more chips on red again and returned to his brooding. Chris had seen Sam briefly at the Arms around noon, had told Gene without prompting that he looked worse than something out of a horror flick and that maybe German birds weren’t his type. That last bit hadn’t made the slightest sense to Gene, but he could agree that the Sam that had finally turned up at the station outside the lifts was a sickly ghost of his usual self, his skin curdled as old milk when Gene knew full well that drink normally made the lad flush up like a virgin off to her bridal bed.

‘Mr. Hunt.’

Gene flicked a glance up at Tony, noted the snug fitting of his plaid shirt beneath that ridiculous coat, the buttons left unfastened deep down his chest. ‘Going out somewhere special tonight?’ he asked, forcibly light.

‘Not now you’re here.’ With a grin, Tony swept into the seat next to his at the roulette table, catching the croupier’s eye as he settled down. ‘Not going thirsty, I hope,’ he added with a frown over the table.

‘Just sat down,’ Gene grunted, watching the rattle of the ball as it bounced spitefully into thirty-three black.

‘Bad luck, Gene.’ He winced sympathetically as the croupier soullessly cleared the chips Gene had automatically laid down on red. ‘Let me at least help you with that pint, yeah?’

Tony turned towards the bar with a snap and waggle of his fingers that had only recently become familiar to Gene; gone were the days when Tony would lower himself to pulling pints at his own bar. The lad liked to keep his hands clean these days. Almost fussily clean, Gene thought, noticing the fresh scent of shampoo wafting from his damp-spiked hair.

Normally, that liquid aroma of soap and water was one he associated with Sam. At least, he had until that ride in the lift up to CID this afternoon with Sam too close at his side, where the uncommon whisper of his sweat burst beneath a spicy kick of aftershave.

Remembering it now made Gene’s frown deepen to a scowl. Funny thing about Sam, he never wore aftershave.

A leggy lass in tails and little else set a pint down at his elbow with a hollow smile and promptly vanished, taking the eyes of half the casino’s punters with her, if not Gene’s. Tony wasn’t looking at her either; his attention was fixed pointedly on Gene as he took a bracing sip of his beer.

‘Better?’ he asked.

‘Not really.’ Gene sniffed absently as he set down his pint at the edge of the roulette table, catching another lilting noseful of Tony’s scent. It hadn’t even been the bizarre whiff of a strange yet strangely familiar aftershave throbbing off Sam’s skin that had unnerved Gene, but rather the musk beneath that it failed to conceal: a stink that Gene’s sense memory had immediately identified as nothing else but the sour aftertaste of sex.

‘I gotta say it, Gene…’ Tilting his head to the side, Tony pursed his lips into a pensive pout before continuing. ‘It’s not like you, coming round in the middle of the day like this. Now, I’d like to think it’s down to my irresistible charm…’ He grinned companionably at Gene’s snort of laughter, ‘but I think it might be something more.’

‘You asking?’ With an irritable pang of guilt, he slapped the last of his chips back down on red. Tony was right, this wasn’t like him at all.

‘Sure, if you’re telling.’

Gene drained another long mouthful from his beer as the croupier passed a hand over the sparsely contended layout, barely hearing the murmur of _No more bets_ over the heavy drone of suspicion clouding his head. As the small silver ball was let loose to roll and rattle around the spinning wheel, Gene tried to rationalize the ugly burst of feeling that had thrown him away from his station, only to find that distance and drink made the whole thing feel flighty and worthless after the fact.

‘Nowt to tell,’ he decided, blinking in surprise as the ball clattered to a stop at sixteen red. The two chips he had dropped on the layout doubled to four, and he let them rest there, too indifferent to second-guess the turns of fate.

It hadn’t been fate, bur regret that had sent him in search of Sam after that explosive scene in CID. Gene had no sooner retreated into his office than he had realized that the lad would need more reassurance than the barking orders he had issued in the face of his manic protests. He had lingered at his desk as long as it took to gather his courage in mouthfuls of cigarette smoke before setting off again to find his DI, who had been nowhere to be found in CID or the Lost and Found or the gents, but then Gene had peered through the doors of the canteen, and…

‘Number five, red.’ Gene’s four chips doubled to eight, and even with Tony’s congratulatory hand clapping his shoulder, it felt nothing like a victory.

‘Whatever it was, might’ve been worth the visit after all. Eh, Gene?’

He forced a smile, leaned back into Tony’s nudging elbow. ‘So long as my luck holds, sure.’ But no measure of luck could reverse the truth of what Gene had witnessed in the canteen. He had found Sam sure enough, only he was seated across from Cartwright. Their mutually bashful smiles had told Gene that they likely weren’t discussing the personnel files Chris had failed to deliver to Sam this morning, files Chris had left with Cartwright instead.

 _May as well promote the plonk if you’re gonna have her doing your damn job,_ he had growled in the lift when Sam had stammered out something about maybe possibly seeing Chris at the Arms after following up some side inquiry or another. Somehow Gene doubted it was a promotion Sam was offering to the girl; even an ambitious thing like Cartwright wouldn’t be blushing like that if Sam had made a detective of her. And there was nothing of Sam’s tight-arsed professionalism shite in the soft, soppy look he was giving her.

Gene had watched it all, glowering from behind the canteen’s door, right up until Sam had tilted his head in that unmistakable way and leaned across the table, soft lips parted to meet Cartwright’s lovely lipsticked mouth. At that moment, he had turned his head away, walked as fast as he could rather than wait to see that inevitable kiss; Gene felt an utter fool, but he wasn’t a masochistic fool.

‘You’re luck is more than good, I’d say.’

Blinking his way out of his sour ruminations, Gene stared in surprise at the growing pile of chips on red. Somehow, they had doubled again to sixteen, surpassing his initial buy-in at the table. ‘Blimey.’ His eye flickered doubtfully from Tony’s broad grin to the rest of the roulette layout as the other players placed their latest wagers. ‘What d’you reckon?’ he asked blankly.

Tony shrugged. ‘Your call, Gene.’

He stared at the neat stack on red, pursing his lips with the briefest hesitation. ‘Oh, what the hell,’ he muttered, letting his chips rest on red and reaching for his pint instead. ‘What’ve I got to lose?’ he said lightly, dowsing the bitter edge of the question in another swallow of beer. Tony chose not to reply, but the hand that gave his shoulder an encouraging squeeze lingered in a silently reassuring way that Gene found he didn’t mind in the slightest.

‘Number seven, red.’ Gene crowed in triumph as the croupier counted out his winnings and slid them along to meet his identical stack. Dazedly, he counted and felt an irrepressible smile tugging at his mouth, sure and strong as the arm Tony slung around his shoulders in a bracing hug. Thirty-two quid.

‘Bloody hell.’ He leaned into Tony’s hug, slapped a hand down on his thigh under the table. ‘How did that happen?’

‘That’s what good luck looks like,’ Tony laughed lightly. His fingers kneaded Gene’s shoulder, imperceptibly tightening their embrace. ‘Aren’t you glad you came here now?’

Gene glanced fondly sideways at Tony. Besides the sudden flush of victory, there was something in the lad’s easy enjoyment of his win that warmed him right through, easing some of the ache of betrayal he had brought with him. ‘Think I should go again?’ he asked with a smirk as the croupier called for new bets. ‘Bet I could take this two-bit casino of yours to the cleaners.’

‘You could,’ Tony grinned back. ‘Or you could do the smart thing and quit while you’re ahead.’

‘Where’s the fun in that?’ Gene scoffed, a cautious eye on his chips. There was lots of sense in cashing out now, but this sudden stroke of luck was infectious. He scanned the table distractedly, so overwhelmed by the options presented by another round of play that the sudden tickle of warm breath near his ear took Gene by surprise.

‘If you want to follow me downstairs,’ Tony said in a low hush, ‘I could show you what fun really looks like.’

Gene swallowed tightly, all thoughts of roulette smothered by the heat that surged sudden and hot in his groin. The playful smirk melted from his face as he turned his head cautiously to measure the intent in Tony’s gaze. His smile had faded several notches as well, though it still danced around lips that curved gently with unspoken promises. Once more, the blood-curdling image of Sam and Cartwright at the threshold of a kiss drifted across his mind and just like that Tony’s offer grew that much more tempting.

Stifling any lingering reluctance, Gene returned Tony’s smile and reached out a hand to take back his chips when a commotion at the door prickled at his copper’s instincts. He squinted back over his shoulder, and flinched self-consciously as Ray elbowed his way past the pit boss without even attempting to show his badge, weaving his way unerringly between gamblers and waitresses towards Gene’s table. Arousal doused by a cold slap of panic, Gene shoved pointedly off his seat at the roulette table, shrugging off Tony’s arm with perhaps more force than completely necessary.

‘Sergeant.’ Gene surprised even himself at the sharpness of his greeting. ‘What the hell are you doing here?’

‘You best come downstairs, Guv.’ Ray shot an unusually assessing glance at Tony before looking back to Gene. Defiantly narrowing his eyes, Gene searched out any sign of suspicion in Ray and found nothing but a sullen impatience that could only mean one thing.

‘Tyler,’ he muttered darkly.

Ray pulled a face, not bothering to say anything more. The _who else?_ was more than implied.

‘The little bugger.’ Gene glared mournfully at his mounting stack of chips. He couldn’t even gamble without Sam mucking it up somehow.

‘Cash him out, already,’ Tony snapped, and trained hands deftly counted out his winnings in green roulette chips and replaced them with a smaller stack of casino chips that fit snugly into Gene’s clenched fist. ‘Gene…’

He cut Tony off with a warning glare. ‘Leave it,’ he growled shortly, refusing to say what manner of _it_ he was referring to but throwing a cautious look in Ray’s direction just in case. Thankfully, Ray was already making his way back out of the casino proper towards the stairs and Gene followed with no further comment, gritting his teeth at the sound of Tony’s footsteps close at his heels.

\+ + +

The ringing of his phone startled Gene from his brooding train of thought with just as sharp a shock as he had felt back then at Ray’s arrival. Choking down the nervous leap of his heart with an anxious cough, he leaned across the desk and lifted the handset to his ear. ‘Hunt here.’

‘Sorry? Hello?’ The voice at the other end was both haughty and uncertain; one would be bad enough, but both qualities conspired swiftly to set Gene’s teeth on edge. He groaned under his breath, planted his aching forehead on the heel of his hand.

‘Yeah, DCI Hunt here, who’s this?’

‘Oh, begging your pardon… this is Dr. Thackeray, I was looking for Inspector Tyler?’

Gene winced at the mention of Sam, all the tumbled frustrations contained by his bitter memories spilling messily to the surface. ‘He’s not here,’ he said bluntly, squinting fleetingly through his fingers to check the view past his office windows. ‘You his gyno or something?’

‘Er… no.’ The voice at the other end cleared its throat delicately, otherwise unperturbed by the question. ‘No, I’m a psychiatrist at Green Lake asylum…’

‘Oh, bloody hell.’ He sat up abruptly. ‘What’s he done now?’

‘Sorry?’ After an anxious pause, Dr. Thackeray filled the silence with an awkward titter of laughter. ‘Oh, you misunderstand me, Mr… Hunt, was it? No, I need to speak to Inspector Tyler about a visit he has scheduled with one of our patients. There has been a bit of confusion at our end so we were hoping the Inspector could change the time of his visit…’

‘What patient?’ An uneasy premonition was already twisting at Gene’s gut. He recognized the name of the asylum now, had sent few enough nutcases there throughout his career for the place to come crawling back to mind.

‘I’m afraid I can’t divulge that information,’ Dr. Thackeray said slowly, but Gene no longer needed to ask.

‘Crane.’ The syllable dropped blunt and unvarnished from his tongue, but it was the hollow nothing at the other end of the line that gave his suspicion the shine of truth.

‘Mr. Hunt…’

‘Tony Crane. Am I right?’

‘Confidentiality doesn’t allow me to divulge…’

‘Oh, shut it.’ Gene’s head sagged down to his chest, eyes closing as he swept up the shards of his temper. ‘What time is he meant to be seeing this mysterious patient of yours?’

Another hesitation buzzed the phone at Gene’s ear. ‘Perhaps I could call back…’

‘What, and take another shot with whatever button-happy spastic my desk sergeant has put on the switch? Give over.’ Shoving aside a bottomless stack of newspapers and Ray’s girlie mags, Gene discovered a biro and scribbled a furious storm cloud of curlicues to test the ink. ‘Just give me the time and date, I’ll see Tyler gets it.’

Dr. Thackeray sighed, barely perceptible at the other end of the line but it only took a few cajoling words more before Gene was rapidly scrawling down the information he wanted on the edge of last week’s crossword. He hung up on the nervous quack with an abortive farewell and closed his eyes a moment, fist clenched tight around his biro, breathing deeply through his nostrils until the ringing reverberation of the phone receiver slamming down faded into silence. Even then, he refused to open his eyes again, hating to see what was going on right under his nose. Maybe it served him right for giving his DI a wide berth since sending Crane down, but still it defied belief, even where Tyler’s craziness was concerned.

Tyler. Sam. And Tony Crane. The ungrateful little _shit._

Plastic cracked against his palm, and Gene threw the leaking biro across his office with a savage curse, already lifting and dialing his phone with the other hand. He didn’t bother asking Phyllis about the daft morons she must be assigning to the switch – it wasn’t worth inflaming her rage anyhow – but simply ordered a WPC up to his office. Any dozey old plonk, damn it, so long as she was bloody quick about it.

Phyllis hung up on him before Gene could beat her to the privilege, but WPC Jones did turn up inside five minutes so he could forgive his Desk Sergeant that much at least. With a short nod of approval, he threw down a memo pad he had rummaged from the back of a drawer. ‘You got a biro?’

To the girl’s credit, she scarcely raised an eyebrow as she took down the message Gene dictated to her. A grim satisfaction settled over his anger as he saw the date and time transcribed in Jones’ neat, anonymous hand.

‘Good girl,’ he praised vaguely, already turning to his filing cabinet with a needy thirst. ‘Leave it on DI Tyler’s desk on your way out, would you.’

WPC Jones tore off the memo slip, then hesitated, glancing uncertainly out through the blinds. ‘Sorry, sir, which desk…?’

‘The only one not drowning in fag ends and copies of Just Jugs,’ he snapped impatiently. Still, he watched her closely as he poured his drink, almost felt a pang of pity as she circled too close to Ray’s desk but she rebuked whatever comment he threw at her with obvious ease and finally laid the note square in the centre of Sam’s spotless desk.

Gene nodded briskly to himself and drained his scotch in one, thoughtfully fingering the slip of newsprint torn from the edge of his crossword. The date scrawled beneath his thumb promised an anxious wait of three days, but he would be patient.

He could wait three lousy days before he gave Tyler what he had coming to him.


	6. Chapter 6

The wait Sam had endured between his last visit and this one had seemed excruciatingly long, though nowhere near long enough to explain the change that had come over the man sharing this heavily scarred folding table in the murmuring hall. The proudly indignant creature from a scant eight days ago was strangely absent, sharpened only by the jut of fine bones straining at his pallid face.

Tony Crane had, in so little time, diminished to a shallow shadow of his former vitality. The defiant blue eyes had paled as they turned inward with the rest of his body, like a starving man huddling into himself for a warmth that couldn’t possibly come from those thin arms. Sam followed the long fingers that dragged over the raw puncture in the crook of his elbow, trying to cling to his own nightmares of a hospital bed and helpless pain and failing to find anywhere near enough satisfaction at such a sorry sight.

‘You said something about my DCI,’ Sam said stiffly, drumming his fingers on the inside of his thigh.

‘Did I?’ Crane’s eyes refused to drift any higher than the paper cup of tea steaming gently at Sam’s side of the table. A pale tongue scraped over cracked lips that Sam refused to pity or mourn.

‘Before you ordered your henchmen to throw us off the roof, remember?’ Though the tea was still far too hot, Sam took a defiant sip, repressing a hiss as the weak brew burned the taste buds off his tongue. ‘You should’ve gone down for murder after that, y’know,’ he added as an aside. ‘Yet here you are instead… might say I did you a favour.’

‘You’ll forgive me if I disagree.’ He watched closely as Sam cautiously lowered his tea back to the table. ‘Too hot for you, Inspector?’ he asked, a mocking echo of his former self.

‘You said it was a crying shame,’ Sam pressed on, letting a brief scowl answer Crane’s pointless question. ‘Having to take out Gene. Because you liked him.’

Crane went strangely still in his chair, features slackened with the effort of unraveling Sam’ statement. Whether he was testing the words against his own memory or scrambling to decipher Sam’s intention in raising the subject was anyone’s guess.

‘I did,’ he said finally.

‘Did what?’ Sam hunched forward across the table. ‘Liked Gene?’

‘Sure.’ His attention drifted, watching as another patient shuffled a meandering path through the rows of tables and chairs. ‘Top bloke, Gene,’ he murmured absently. ‘A good man.’

‘Yeah.’ He ducked his head to hide a faint smile. ‘Yeah, he is.’

‘At least,’ Crane added slowly, ‘he was. But that was before you came round.’

Sam glanced up sharply. ‘Bullshit,’ he snapped. ‘Before I showed up, he was… he’s better now than he was before.’

‘The Gene Hunt I knew wouldn’t have sent a sane man to this place.’ A thin finger stabbed neatly across the space between them. ‘That’s down to you, Inspector. You and your bad influence.’

‘ _My_ bad influence?’ Sam forced a derisive laugh but his heart hammered painfully in his chest, stealing breath from the sound.

‘I saw the way you swan about on the job,’ Crane carried on, head rolling on a loose neck as he spoke to the ceiling. ‘Think you’re so upright and proper but you’re the most rotten apple in the bushel. Rotten, mad… ruined Gene just as sure as you ruined me…’

‘I’ve made him _better_.’ Sam seethed at the pitying disbelief in Crane’s gaunt face, a fresh protest waiting heavy on his tongue when a long, wailing cry made him jump in his chair. Head swiveling around, Sam stared as three orderlies rushed to tackle a patient who had already vanished beneath their hulking white shapes.

‘Is this better?’ Crane ignored the interruption, his flat tone showing no sign of distress as the unseen patient was dragged noisily from the lounge. ‘Poor Gene…’ His smiled slackened, head lolling lax on a bony shoulder. ‘I remembered,’ he added softly, lips pursing and relaxing thoughtfully. ‘Last night. I remembered.’

Sam sat up in his chair. ‘About Gene?’

‘No… no, no…’ Refusal stumbled rapidly off Crane’s tutting tongue, running off the beat of his heels beneath the table; their vibration thrummed the cracked linoleum all the way to Sam’s booted feet. ‘No… it was about you… I remembered you…’

‘Dead thoughtful of you,’ he muttered impatiently.

‘I kissed you first.’

‘What?’

‘The first time I had you…’ Crane slouched his voice as low as his body, a leering fondness pulling at his mouth. ‘At least I gave you a kiss first… am I right?’

‘You’ve no way of knowing that.’ Hands clenching tight around his kneecaps under the table, Sam leaned forward, speaking low and deliberate. ‘It hasn’t happened yet.’

‘You tasted like coffee…’ One of Crane’s bony fingers lifted to trace his own mouth, as though to touch the memory of that flavour. ‘You used to drink way too much of the stuff… had you wound up tighter than a jack in the box.’

Though it felt a touch shaky on his lips, Sam forced a hard smirk. ‘You’re making this up, Crane,’ he said, falsely confident. ‘I mean… look at me, how hard is that to guess?’

‘Coffee…’ he confirmed slowly, eyes dropping to the cooling tea. ‘And something tart… sweet… a bit of something sticky left at the corner of your mouth…’ His tongue darted sideways out of his mouth, dragging over stubble-rough skin. ‘I licked you clean,’ he mumbled out of the distended shape of his cheek, wide eyes crawling slowly towards Sam. ‘You tasted… oh, so very good. Tart. But so sweet.’

His smile fading, Sam sucked his lips back tight against his teeth to stop himself from imitating that lewd experiment.

‘Lemon slice.’ A light of triumph illuminated Crane’s pale face.

‘Stop that.’

An icy swell of horror lurched Sam in his seat. He swallowed hard, ducking his head. It wasn’t possible…

‘You had a lemon slice with your coffee that afternoon,’ Crane sing-songed, teeth flashing in a feral grin. ‘Naughty, naughty…’

‘I said, _stop._ ’ Sam snapped his head back up, glaring through the panic clouding his eyes. ‘You can’t know that… it won’t happen for another thirty years…’

‘Why shouldn’t I know that?’ The smile evaporated from Crane’s face, replaced by a blank anger. ‘What’s wrong, Inspector? Don’t like that I finally see the whole picture now? I _understand_ now…’

‘You don’t understand shit.’ Involuntarily, Sam’s eye shifted past Crane, taking in the scattering of patients at their own tables. Somehow, the fragile breach separating Crane from the likes of the wan older man with his plastic spoons was narrowing to nothing at all.

‘Oh, but I think I do. See now, you don’t get to talk to me about the man I’ll be thirty years from now like it’s something I’m meant to know, something I’m meant to feel _guilty_ about, even…’ Crane frowned down at the tips of his fingers where they hammered out the staccato beat of his statements. ‘You don’t get to open the door to the future and throw a fit when I choose to walk on through. That’s not how it works.’

‘It doesn’t work like this either.’ Shoving his chair back with a deafening screech, Sam leapt to his feet. ‘I’m the only one here,’ he hissed, reaching blindly for his coat. ‘Me, _alone_. I’m here in 1973, and you’re all the way in the future. Got it?’

‘If you can travel back in time, why can’t I?’ he asked, innocent as a child’s question. ‘Maybe I followed your body here, went drip-drip-drip through your IV back in that hospital room… drip-drip-drip all the way through your blood…’

Breathing hard, Sam clutched gratefully at the battered smoothness of leather beneath his fingers. He forced an arm through a sleeve, inhaled shakily as the convincingly real scent of animal hide filled his nose.

‘When will I see you again?’

Sam shook his head, wrestling into his coat with a wary eye on Crane, whose solicitous grin widened to a leer.

‘Next Thursday afternoon, maybe?’

He went still, fingers tightening around his lapels. Neither of them spoke, but Crane’s wink chilled him to the core.

Legs working hard, Sam stormed out of the visitor’s lounge, rushed down the glooming halls and echoing stairs and burst into sunlight. He would have walked forever, broken into a run past the gravel lot and his borrowed car and escaped into the countryside that didn’t show the passage of time the way the city did. In that maddening moment, he would have taken those first wild steps if not for the hard gleam of light off the copper-coated body of a car, if not for that car’s owner glowering directly at him.

‘Guv.’ His boots skidded in the gravel at the foot of Green Lake’s concrete steps, his heart still pounding hard in his throat.

‘Tyler.’ Despite the wide-open distance between them, Gene didn’t raise his voice any louder than if they had been sat together in the Arms; he didn’t need to in the silence that cloaked the asylum’s isolation at the end of the country road. There was no hint of wind out here today, and the faint chirps of birds were nothing to a Gene Hunt determined to be heard.

‘What are you doing here?’ There was little point in avoiding the obvious question. Sam approached by several cautious strides, spine already stiffening in anticipation of a fight.

‘Could ask you the same question.’ Gene didn’t move from his forcibly casual slouch against the Cortina’s bonnet, but the sharp squint he threw past Sam’s shoulder to the hulking mass of the asylum behind him was harshly accusatory. ‘Not that an obvious answer isn’t springing to mind but the fact that you’re strutting back out of there tells me you weren’t doing the sensible thing by checking yourself in.’

‘If you’ve only come all the way out here to take the piss…’

‘It’s not taking the piss when it’s the bloody truth, Sam.’ The words dropped leaden between them but still Gene didn’t raise his voice, as though reluctant to speak any louder than a low rumble. ‘Maybe you don’t quite appreciate how close you came to getting dragged off by the not-so-nice men in the white coats so I’ll say this once and hope to hell it sinks into that busted cuckoo clock that you call a brain because so help me, I might not be able to bail you out a second time. Leave. Tony Crane. Be.’

‘You just won’t stop covering his arse, will you?’ Sam shook his head in disgust. ‘Why do you want me out of it so damn badly? What are you afraid I’m going to find out?’

Watching closely, Sam caught the anxious tightening of Gene’s mouth but the roll of his eyes was heavy with disdain. ‘Stop acting like such a delusional prat,’ he said wearily. ‘There’s nowt to know about Crane that you don’t already know. So get off your bloody high horse and leave the poor sod alone already.’

‘Don’t see why I should,’ Sam countered mulishly, crossing his arms across his chest. ‘That _poor sod_ got exactly what he had coming to him.’

‘Like hell he did.’ A burst of anger finally made Gene push off from the Cortina, loafers crunching over gravel as he advanced on Sam. ‘He may be a villain, but he did _not_ deserve to be locked up in _that_ place half as much as you do.’

A sting of hurt pricked Sam from the inside, made him flinch and straighten defiantly. ‘Then why don’t you waltz in there and see if the doctors will do a swap?’ he sneered. ‘If that’s what you think I _deserve._ ’

Gene growled out a wordless noise of frustration and turned away, stalking several short paces back and forth that left Sam confused at what looked like an effort to actually think before he answered. He kicked at the gravel, scrubbed a hand through his hair, patted down his pockets and finally came up with one of his battered flasks.

‘I made my choice, Sam,’ he muttered finally, taking a swig and frowning down at the scuffmarks marring his white shoes. ‘Still like to think it was the right one, but won’t count for shit if you go in there and bollocks it up by giving Crane even more ammunition than he’s already got.’

‘Don’t see why I shouldn’t, he wouldn’t know what to do with the truth if I handed it to him on a silver fucking platter.’

‘Isn’t that what you already tried to do?’ The blistering bellow startled Sam, transfixed him to the spot as Gene glared piercingly across the lot at him. ‘Wherever it is you think you come from – no, shut your stupid gob and _listen_ – whatever big secret you think you’ve got and you go flapping your gums to him and not _me_?’

‘And look where it got him!’ Sam jabbed an angry finger at the imposing grey brick looming above them. ‘ _That’s_ why I can never tell, why I…’ An embarrassing swell of unspeakable emotion stuck in his throat, choked off his anger with a shuddering gasp. His hand dropping heavy and useless at his side, Sam stared bleakly back at Gene, watched the rapid rise and fall of his shoulders as he waited with searing eyes and clenched jaw. Even standing still, he was so powerful, too powerful and too goddamn _magnificent_ to be dragged down into this madness.

Sam spun on his heel, forced himself to walk away.

‘Oy!’ Gene yelled inevitably after him. ‘Don’t you bloody dare turn your back on me! Get your skinny arse back here before I kick it so hard you’ll–’

‘Like hell you will.’ Though he didn’t stop walking, Sam glanced back to shout his interruption in a killing tone. ‘Just piss off and stay out of it yourself, if you know what’s good for you.’

Flinging himself into his borrowed car and peeling out of Green Lake’s lot as fast as he could, Sam couldn’t help but spare a last glance at Gene’s stunned face. He saw the moment his shocked features turned to stone, watched him turn away from the retreating car in the rearview mirror, and couldn’t help but think it might be for the best.


	7. Chapter 7

‘You just missed your Inspector.’ Dr. Thackeray glanced owlishly at him through his horn-rimmed glasses as he led Gene down Green Lake’s subdued, vaguely antiseptic smelling corridors.

‘Can’t say I did, really,’ he replied tersely. The argument with Sam had left him as shaken and exposed as he had felt the day he had Crane dragged off to this fate, and walking the asylum’s dingy halls was doing little to improve his mood. Dr. Thackeray seemed to note his discomfort in a knowing blink of his magnified eyes but had the good sense to keep his gob shut on that count at least.

He wasn’t, unfortunately, completely silent. ‘I don’t mind saying that I was a bit reluctant to agree to this,’ he said admonishingly. ‘It’s not our policy to allow unscheduled visits… though we’re always happy to comply with the police, of course,’ he added at Gene’s impatient glare. They drew to a stop outside a pair of swinging doors whose security glass revealed a bright yet dreary space filled with long tables and plastic chairs where white-clad ghosts mixed with awkward denizens of the real world. Gene couldn’t spot Crane among their number but Dr. Thackeray’s gaze through the glass was intent upon a single point.

‘I should also point out that DI Tyler’s visit just now didn’t seem to improve Mr. Crane’s equilibrium… quite the opposite, truth be told,’ he sighed, brow furrowing unpleasantly. ‘Frankly, I can’t imagine that a visit from you is going to make matters any worse for his recovery.’

‘Well, I’m flattered to hear it.’ Gene tilted his head at an angle, attempting to follow the sightline of the doctor’s frown and seeing no one he recognized. ‘So… which table is he at?’

Dr. Thackeray glanced up at him with a small, almost pitying smile. ‘Follow me.’

Gene drew himself up to his full height, kept his hands tucked protectively into his coat pockets as Thackeray led him down a central clearing between two long banks of tables and took a left turning a little more than halfway through the murmuring room. Momentarily thrown by the change in direction, Gene stared around confusedly and caught the sullen glare of a skinny blond lad who looked nothing like Crane but more than a little like someone he once knew a lot better. He sucked in a short breath and quickly looked away again, rapidly scanning the room until he spotted Thackeray embarrassingly close by, speaking to a barrel-chested orderly over the dark bowed head of another patient. Shuffling closer on cautious feet, Gene looked from doctor to orderly to patient and felt his breath catch in his throat all over again.

‘Tony,’ he murmured, dry and rasping as bleached bone. The face that tilted up at the name was as pale as that and twice as bare. The fine cheekbones and defiant jaw that were once animated by lively flesh now stood out sharply naked through a fragile skin that looked near to breaking.

‘Chief Inspector Hunt here would like a few words with you, Mr. Crane,’ Dr. Thackeray explained in what Gene thought was an unnecessarily loud, insipid tone. He shot the quack an irritated glare before dropping heavily into the empty chair opposite Crane, increasingly uneasy at his lack of response to either Gene’s arrival or his doctor’s patronizing tone.

Gene crossed his arms, hands tucked firmly under his coat as he studied Crane’s diminishing form across the table, unnerved by the squint-eyed examination he was receiving in return. There was an apology stuck on his tongue but contrary to popular belief Gene did try to listen to the barristers once in a while so he shoved the pity aside and got straight to the point.

‘You’ve been messing round with my DI, Tony.’

‘So he _is_ yours…’ Crane’s chin dropped in a lax nod. ‘I’d been wondering about that…’

‘I don’t mean it like _that_ ,’ he snapped hastily, scowling as he felt heat creeping up around his ears.

‘You always meant it like that.’ The rapid switch in Crane’s disposition was startling; there was nothing withered or withdrawn about the blistering glare he shot at him from beneath his bony brows. ‘Even when you knew you couldn’t have him, you carried on like you owned him… no, no,’ he corrected, eyes wide. ‘You carried on like he owned _you_.’

‘Bullshit.’

‘How many times did you turn me down?’ There was a bitterness in the question that Gene didn’t recognize, a hurt he had never suspected but it lent a sulking edge to Crane’s frown all the same. ‘Oh, I know you were up for it, knew it from the start,’ he hushed, nodding significantly. ‘Only every time, _that_ one would flit his way through your mind and that would put an end to that.’

‘Leave off it already,’ Gene snapped, scowling down at the table. This wasn’t what he had come to hear.

‘There was always a look,’ he continued, ignoring Gene’s protest. ‘Like this shadow passing over your eyes… Now that I’ve met him, can say it was like seeing him lurking right there inside your head. Filling you with so much _guilt_. Then again,’ he added thoughtfully, ‘he did say he’d made you up. Might be some truth in that.’

Gene returned his contemplative stare flatly, unwilling to respond.

‘I remember what did it in the end though. What snipped them strings Tyler’s been tugging at the back of your mind.’ Dark eyebrows danced significantly on Crane’s pale brow. ‘That business at the Gazette offices.’

 _‘Saw the papers last week, Chief Inspector.’ A cheeky grin was set wide on Tony’s lips, shredding years from his face in a way that made Gene feel even older, wearier as he elbowed up to the bar. ‘Proper hero’s work, that. Think a celebratory drink’s in order.’_

 _‘Smashing.’ Gene listlessly drew his two fingers of scotch within the shadow his hunched body cast in the lurid red light of the casino’s bar. This wasn’t his usual port of call when his main priority was to get properly bladdered, but Gene reckoned if he had to absorb another congratulatory slap on the back or sycophantic pint, he might well end up snapping back at one of his men with the sort of morale-destroying missile he might regret._

‘You came to me,’ Crane said with a hint of pride. ‘You could’ve stayed with your men, but you came to my casino instead.’

‘Needed to get away from it all,’ Gene agreed numbly, tucking his hands tight under his arms. ‘All that ruddy celebrating going on at the Arms… didn’t want to play the hero after that mess… not that you were much better, mind,’ he added with a frown.

 _‘Papers made it sound like a pretty close call.’ Tony leaned in, long hands clasped around his own drink. ‘Then again, we all know what the papers are like… always with their exaggerations…’ he added with an irritable twitch that pulled a reluctant huff of amusement from Gene’s chest._

 _‘Very little exaggeration on this one, Tony.’ He tried to make this second round go down slower than the first, tried to actually taste the whisky and decided, with a spark of pleasant surprise, that it was a pretty damn good one, better than the cheap swill Tony normally served. ‘Jackie Queen was there the whole time, and for once she didn’t need to embroider guts and garters round the edges to fill out her column.’_

 _Tony frowned. ‘Didn’t I read something about a gunshot?’_

 _‘Yeah. Ruined my favourite flask and all.’ The dull bruise throbbed beneath the weight of his second-best flask where it now sat promoted to his breast pocket, but Gene refused to rub at the ache. ‘Comes with the job,’ he added dismissively when he caught the worry creasing Tony’s suddenly paled forehead._

 _‘Yeah, course,’ he agreed softly, forcing a smile and a shrug. ‘Don’t mind if I drink to the flask at least?’_

 _Gene smiled over an ironic clinking of glasses. ‘Yeah, why the hell not.’_

‘I did admire you, back then,’ Crane admitted with a quiet honesty that took Gene aback. ’Reckon you thought I did it for all the wrong reasons…’

‘We were always about the wrong reasons, Tony.’

‘There’s nothing wrong with what we did,’ Crane retorted, sullen as a defiant child. ‘Never did anyone else any harm by it.’

Gene pressed his lips tight between his teeth, wondering how deep he wanted to wade into the murky waters of his guilt. ‘Still married, aren’t I?’ he muttered. Crane dismissed the half-hearted observation with a shrug.

‘And I’ve got my Eve… at least, I used to,’ he added, a low afterthought that darkened his already grim countenance. ‘Great thing about Eve, she didn’t mind any more than that missus of yours would’ve done if she’d stayed around long enough to know you.’

 _The knowing glow in Eve’s unfathomably dark eyes did nothing to ease the discomfort that had tied Gene’s tongue and stomach into knots since taking the significant steps down from casino to office. He stiffly nodded his silent goodnight as she slip-swayed gracefully from the room, striking switches along her way until their privacy was lit by little more than the glow from the softly bubbling fish tank._

 _With Eve gone for the night and the casino closed above, the office has fallen as silent as a secret. Though staying perfectly still on the settee felt safer, like hiding in plain sight, Gene raised his whisky to his mouth to slake his parched mouth and Tony moved in predictable counterpoint, long fingers drawing back the loose drape of his jacket._

 _‘Was it here?’ His hand slid up to his chest, pressing down hard just left of his breastbone. Gene shook his head as he swallowed, groping blindly for Tony’s wrist and shifting his touch the scant inch necessary to find his bruise, hissing softly as his fingertips gouged the dull echo of impact._

 _‘Hurts, does it?’ Gene turned his head warily at the dry crackle of malice behind the question, but he found Tony’s eyes filled with another intent entirely, if not completely innocent._

 _‘Some, yeah.’ He loosened his grip on Tony’s wrist, let his arm drop in unspoken invitation. Tony rewarded the conciliatory gesture with an easing of his fingers, fingers that walked aside to pluck the buttons of his shirt. Gene hadn’t found a clean vest to wear that morning so Tony’s hand fell immediately upon bare skin that goosepimpled rapidly in tight anticipation as his shirt was pushed aside._

 _Gene stared down as though from some unreal distance as Tony’s dark head dropped past his shoulder. Lips brushed the purpled skin directly above his left nipple, close-mouthed and almost chaste, like a blessing of the bullet that had nearly killed him._

 _A sudden shudder took him at the thought. Between the blur of the moment and his forced bravado, Gene had never bothered to acknowledge how close to death he had come. Not until now._

 _‘Easy, now.’ Most likely misreading the cues of his body, Tony transformed his kiss into a lewd swirl of tongue around a puckered nipple that was misreading in turn the cues of Gene’s conscience. ‘I’ll kiss it all better,’ he said lightly, licking and nipping his way downward, a hand slipping peremptorily into Gene’s lap._

‘One thing I never understood…’ Crane tapped a finger on the scratched tabletop. ‘Now I know what he’s like, I could never imagine Tyler treating you like a hero. You could’ve gone to him. If you really wanted to,’ he added, with more than a shot of cynicism.

‘If he’d have given me the time of day?’ A bitter little laugh escaped Gene’s dry throat. He stared around, wondering what the orderlies would think if he pulled out that second-best flask of his in this place. ‘Give over, was all about Cartwright afterwards.’ That had stung far worse than the grim memory of that dawning kiss, to know that he had laid himself so utterly bare in that stationary cupboard, that he had taken a bullet in a reckless attempt to save Sam in those final desperate moments, only to see Sam draw even closer to Annie in the aftermath. Their shared smiles were different after that, excluding everyone else to the point that Gene no longer felt welcome in his own ruddy pub, much less in Sam’s company.

‘Cartwright,’ Crane murmured. ‘Yet another bloke? The tart.’

Gene smirked, shook his head. ‘Nah, she’s a bird. Lovely girl, great tits.’

‘Tough act to follow.’ Crane clucked his tongue, shaking his head. ‘Tell you what though,’ he added with a grin. ‘It was good.’

 _Tony was a reassuringly heavy weight of lanky limbs between the sprawl of Gene’s aching thighs, knobbled spine tight to Gene’s wet and softening cock as he squirmed restlessly into the slide of Gene’s hand over his own jutting length. With his head tipped back against Gene’s shoulder, long neck offered freely to worrying teeth, this sleek length of a man appeared beheaded before Gene’s unfocused eyes, an anonymous body that responded to his every touch with shuddering abandon and wordless groans._

 _He closed his eyes at the tangle of fingers in the hair at the back of his head, let himself be tugged deeper into the illusion as hard flesh pulsed within his hand and coated his fingers with a wet heat, indiscernible from that of any other man._

Gene ducked his head. ‘Yeah,’ he admitted in a mumble. ‘Weren’t all bad.’

‘Better than Tyler ever was, that’s for sure.’

The reverberation of the name from inside Gene’s head to Crane’s smirking lips confused him at first, left Gene wondering if his distracted mind had strung the words together wrong. ‘You what?’ He squinted up at Crane, the blank uncertainty in his gut flooding rapidly with a sickening suspicion.

‘Not that I didn’t enjoy what he had to offer,’ Crane continued casually.

‘You’re winding me up.’ The roaring wave of bitter disgust washed over him as quickly as it had come, leaving nothing but stony disdain in its wake. ‘He can’t stand the sight of you. He’d sooner gnaw off his own girly hands than touch you.’

‘Oh, I know he hates me,’ he conceded easily, unconcerned. ‘And believe you me, Gene, the feeling is more than mutual.’ For a breathless moment, the smile dropped from Crane’s mouth, transforming his face in the blink of an eye into such a concentration of loathing that Gene bristled instinctively. His hands twitched and clenched with the urge to destroy this creature before he did Sam any harm but the vision was gone before he could act, replaced once more by Crane’s familiar, mischievous half-smile.

‘But,’ he concluded with a shrug, ‘that’s exactly what made it so good.’

Struck speechless by the other man’s rapid change of mood, Gene sat back and considered Crane silently through narrowed eyes. Even with the boyish attitude slicking his surface once more, Gene could no longer see the places where that playfulness used to sit, deeper than skin and lighting him up from the inside. Something he didn’t recognize as Tony was lurking under there now, usurping the lively young man he once knew. Whoever he was now, Gene suspected it would be unwise to trust him any further than he had already dared.

‘You’re lying,’ he decided slowly, flinching slightly at Crane’s stifled little laugh. ‘Or else you’ve gone proper mental in here.’

‘Or…’ He drew out the sound like chewing gum pulled between a shoe and a hot pavement. ‘Or I’m _not_ lying, and that DI of yours is a right little spitfire when he’s riled up. All that anger and energy breaking loose… oh, yes, it’s something alright.’ Crane offered Gene a knowing, conspiratorial nod. ‘You know what I’m talking about, of course.’

Gene shifted in his chair, refusing to adjust himself in his trousers despite the uncomfortable shape of his throbbing arousal. ‘No,’ he snapped mulishly. ‘I don’t.’

‘Your loss,’ Crane shrugged.

‘Yours, more like.’ Though so much blood was rushing between his legs, there was fire enough left in him to rise and lean across the table with all the force of an interrogation. ‘You won’t be laying another finger on him ever again. Not from inside your padded cell.’

‘That’s not what he tells me.’ An unfazed smile met Gene’s glare. ‘Your pretty DI and I have a date set some thirty years from now.’

Gene blinked, dumbfounded.

‘And after that…’ His eyes faded out of focus, tongue working the inside of a translucent cheek. ‘Oh, after that… I’ll have my revenge…’

‘The hell you will.’

‘I will,’ Crane disagreed mindlessly, pale eyes lost in the distance. ‘You’ve seen it already. I brought your boy to his knees. I took his breath away.’

Gene stared down at Crane’s thin body spilling out of his chair, lips pressed thin. The well-meaning advice of countless barristers echoed again in his ears but damn the squirrelly bastards, he seldom minded their rubbish anyway.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, low and heartfelt, nodding a tight farewell as he walked away.

Dr. Thackeray was waiting for him at the visitor’s lounge door, the watery eyes behind their thick lenses narrowed to match his watchful frown. Suddenly too tired to argue, Gene mutely followed the thin man’s white-coated tails into the dim corridor, heading off any admonitions with an offer of his hipflask. To his distant surprise, Thackeray accepted with a graceless nod, draining a more than healthy mouthful of what Gene knew was a harsh bastard of a blended before handing it back with nary a wince at the inevitable burn.

Gene took his own necessary swig before tucking the flask back into his breast pocket. ‘Blimey,’ he muttered. He wasn’t talking about the whisky.

‘In a word, yes.’ Dr. Thackeray sighed, staring past Gene’s shoulder towards the visitor lounge window. ‘I hope that helped with your inquiry?’

‘Not in the slightest.’

‘Can’t say as I’m all that surprised.’

Frowning at the dry cynicism in the quack’s tone, Gene stared down at the scuffmarks his loafers were carving into the linoleum. ‘In fact, I think it’s fair to say that we won’t need to inconvenience Mr. Crane any further. Best just let you do…’ He waved an inexpressive hand, ‘you know, do your… psycho-thing. Make him better.’

‘We’ll certainly try our best,’ Thackeray said, flat and unpromising.

‘And just so we’re clear, like,’ he added, ‘DI Tyler won’t have any cause to be visiting Mr. Crane either.’

A wash of relief melted some of the tension around Thackeray’s non-existent mouth. ‘It would certainly help Mr. Crane’s recovery if that were the case,’ he agreed emphatically.

‘Thought it might.’ Gene reinforced the point with a meaningful glare, but found he had nothing further to say. With a last glance back through that grim square of fluorescent light, he made his way out of this place that would either be Tony’s last hope or, he feared with a dreadful certainty, his prison as sure as if Gene had done the right thing from the start.


	8. Chapter 8

Sam had long lost count of the number of rings droning at his tired ear. They were hollow noise, stripped of time like the dry silence of CID this early in the morning.

As he waited on the line, Sam dragged his sleepless gaze over the otherwise empty office. A premature team retreat to the pub the night before conspired with the early hour to make the air somewhat more breathable than usual; the miasma of cigarette smoke that typically occupied the lower atmosphere of CID had dissipated in the night, leaving a cold staleness in its wake.

Horribly, the lack of smoke didn’t feel right anymore. Smoke proved that life was alight in here, from the fading embers of the aging detectives to the singular inferno that was Gene. Without them, CID was lifeless save for the hollow tick of the office clock setting Sam’s teeth on edge. He huddled down in his desk chair, ducking his head as far into the upturned collar of his leather coat as he could manage while keeping the phone’s receiver close to his ear.

The line to Dr. Thackeray’s office kept ringing, which was enough to keep Sam waiting. He had already tried this number twice since startling awake before the sun, his chest tight with horror and his cock throbbing beneath the sheets. The nocturnal images that had conspired to leave him in that confused state of frustrated arousal refused to take on a clear form in Sam’s waking mind but the impression left behind echoed his determination to see Crane again and finally resolve this madness.

If it could be resolved at all.

‘Doctor Thackeray.’ A voice, dull and small, broke across the monotonous ringing in Sam’s ear, startling him out of his hypnotic torpor. Rapidly clearing his tired throat, Sam sat up straighter in his desk chair.

‘Yes, hello… er, good morning. This is DI Tyler calling.’

‘Good morning, Inspector.’ Thackeray’s reply was polite on the surface, but Sam didn’t miss the several beats of hesitation that preceded it. ‘What can I do for you?’

‘Well, I was calling about Tony Crane,’ he began, somewhat uncomfortable at the immediacy of the doctor’s question. ‘I haven’t heard anything from you or your staff since my last visit, so I thought I’d best get in touch…’ He trailed off, frowning at the soft sigh he detected at the other end of the line.

‘I take it you haven’t spoken to DCI Hunt about this.’

Sam chewed uneasily at his lower lip. It was true that he had been avoiding Gene with dogged determination since their confrontation in the parking lot outside Green Lake last week, but he failed to see what business that was of Thackeray’s. ‘No,’ he admitted tightly. ‘Can’t say I have. Why?’

‘Your DCI paid a visit with Mr. Crane last week. Not long after you, actually.’ Sam’s hand tightened around the phone, his blood turning to ice water in his veins. ‘We spoke briefly afterwards, and agreed that it would be for the best if my patient has no further contact with you or any other part of your department.’

Even though Gene, like the rest of the team, wasn’t here yet and likely wouldn’t arrive for another hour at least, Sam shot a reproachful glare at his office door. ‘I don’t understand,’ he said stiffly. ‘You _asked me_ to visit Mr. Crane. I don’t know why my Guv went to see him, but that investigation is closed. I thought this was about Mr. Crane’s welfare…’

‘And it is,’ Dr. Thackeray interjected quickly. ‘Mr. Crane’s mental welfare is my foremost concern, which is why I think it best that he continues his recovery without any… outside stressors.’

Guilt plucked delicately at Sam’s frayed conscience. ‘What are you implying?’ he asked, deliberately cool.

‘I’m not implying anything, Inspector.’ By comparison, Thackeray’s reply was still politely modulated, designed to soothe ruffled feathers. ‘But I need to protect my patient’s best interests, and DCI Hunt agreed…’

‘Fine.’ In a heartbeat, Sam’s patience was gone, his frustration with Thackeray turning rapidly about-face and directing itself like a gunshot upon his absent Guv. ‘Thanks for letting me know… eventually.’

‘I do hope you understand…’

‘Good-bye, Doctor.’ He hung up the phone before Dr. Thackeray could go any further with his pathetic attempt at an apology. Rude though it was, Sam knew he was doing the psychiatrist a mercy; any longer on the line and he would have exploded with the anger he needed to unleash on Gene. He sagged back into his chair with a scowl at his wristwatch. It was still far too early in the morning, and their mutual evasions of the past week meant that Gene would be harder to find than usual. With a low grumble, he flipped open the first file folder he could find and buried his frustration in paperwork, keeping a close eye on the corridors beyond the office through the surrounding windows.

He waited over an hour before he glimpsed the first of the detectives stumbling blearily into work clutching their sports pages and cups of tea. Sam fixed each one with a watchful eye that largely went ignored, save for Ray who returned his stare with a challenging scowl.

‘You seen the Guv yet today?’ he asked sharply. Ray considered him with a long, hard stare as he dropped into his own desk chair, chomping all the while.

‘Sure, Boss,’ he offered finally, as though deciding Sam hadn’t yet given him good reason today to ignore him entirely. ‘Just saw him down the canteen.’

‘Right.’ Sam rose from his desk and fastened up his coat as if it were a suit of armour before setting off in pursuit, Ray’s sarcastic ‘You’re welcome’ a dim echo somewhere far behind.

He didn’t find Gene in the canteen, though Gwen kindly assured Sam that he had only just finished his bacon buttie a few minutes ago. Shrugging off her offer of the same as politely as he could, Sam dashed out again and stalked aimlessly back towards CID, eyes scanning the corridors and narrowing at the sight of Gene’s shaggy blond head passing beyond the small cluster of uniforms by the drinks machine. He ignored the unhelpful leaping sensation in his chest, stifled the strange anxiety that came of not having seen Gene these past few days with a slow and steadying breath.

‘Guv,’ he called out. Sam saw Gene freeze in his steps with a savage twist of satisfaction. The constables turned at his shout and, as though sensing something of Sam’s mood, disappeared quickly around the corner, leaving Gene fully exposed like the prelude to a Mexican stand-off.

‘Tyler,’ he greeted stiffly, eyes narrowed.

‘Hunt,’ Sam replied, short and sharp. He advanced by several clicking footsteps, pleased though not surprised to see Gene standing his ground, jaw tilted defiantly upward. ‘We need to talk.’

Lips pressed thin, Gene glanced past Sam as though to check for onlookers. ‘Not here,’ he said.

‘Fine.’ Sam scanned the corridor, spotted the door for the gents. ‘In here.’

Gene wordlessly followed Sam into the toilets, pausing to turn the deadbolt on the door before confronting Sam with a challenging glare. ‘So?’

‘You went in to see Tony Crane,’ he said flatly. ‘Must’ve been right after I left. I want to know why.’

‘How about this.’ Gene sniffed evasively, stuffed his hands in his pockets. ‘You tell me why the hell you were seeing him in the first place, and I might think about dignifying that question with an response that doesn’t involve me smacking that smug look off your face.’

‘So defensive already?’ Sam forced a taunting smirk, crossing his arms. ‘What’re you trying to hide from me?’

‘Nowt that’s any sodding business of yours,’ he growled. ‘And you can drop the bloody self-righteous bullshit right now if you know what’s good for you. You haven’t got so much as a postage stamp’s worth of moral ground to stand on, the way you’ve been carrying on.’

‘The way _I’ve_ been carrying on?’ Sam barked an indignant laugh. ‘ _You_ just waltzed in there and told Dr. Thackeray to stop our visits like it was nothing! You had no right…’ He trailed off, partly to catch his angered breath but thrown as well by the way Gene grimaced and turned away, dragging a hand over his mouth as though to wipe away the ugliest choice of his words before they spilled out.

‘Maybe not,’ he said gruffly, planting his hands on his hips and turning to face Sam again. ‘Maybe it’s none of my business where you get your dick wet, I can deal with that, but Cartwright deserves better and if you haven’t got the decency to do right by that girl–’

‘What?’ Flummoxed, Sam gaped at Gene, arms dropping to his sides. There was an accusation in there that sparked panic in his chest, but it was wrapped up in so much confusion that he scarcely knew how to start unpacking the whole mess. ‘What has Annie got to do with this?’

‘What has Annie…’ With a snort, Gene shook his head and stalked closer, disdain writ large on his reddening face. ‘Always knew you were a funny piece of work, Sam, what with that business with Joni Newton and all but I never took you for such a loose slag.’

‘Whoa, hold on.’ Sam reeled as though slapped. ‘What the hell are you trying to say?’

‘You’ve been messing around on Cartwright,’ Gene spat, driving the point home with a hard shove. ‘With Tony Crane, of all people.’

Of all the protests to come to mind, Sam could have chosen a smarter one. ‘It was only the once,’ he lied, flinching as Gene snorted bitterly.

‘You can’t even stand the poor bastard,’ he scoffed, eyeing Sam as though seeing him for the first time. ‘Is that what gets you off, Tyler? Fucking about with someone so hard that it sends them round the twist?’

The disappointment in Gene’s eyes was too much, far worse than any anger; with an indignant snarl, he struck back with a shove of his own. ‘And I’m _not_ with Annie,’ he added defensively. ‘Where the hell did you get that idea?’

‘Thought it was bleeding obvious, the way you carry on.’ Gene recovered quickly from the shove, stalking forward and crowding Sam up against the mirrored wall. ‘The looks, the snogging… then again,’ he muttered, ‘maybe you’re just stringing her along same as you did Crane. Never can tell with you.’

‘I’m not stringing _anyone_ along!’ Sam shouted, astonished at the bitter note in Gene’s sudden bark of laughter. ‘For crying out loud, Gene, what is your problem?’

His face darkened stormily. ‘You don’t want to ask that, Sam.’

‘Then start talking bloody sense already!’ The cold mirror was tight against his tensed shoulder blades, and Gene was too close. Sam clenched his fists, prepared to fight his way out of this insanity if necessary. ‘Come on, Gene, enough. Tell me why any of this is any of your goddamn business or I swear I’ll–’

Sam never got to make good on his threat, or even finish delivering it. One moment he was glaring into Gene’s dangerously narrowed green eyes and the next he was seeing nothing at all, his world collapsed as though crushed in a grasping fist as Gene closed in, planted both his large hands on Sam’s heaving shoulders and stole his mouth in a savage, graceless kiss.

Stunned, Sam could do nothing but answer with a muffled sound that Gene lapped up greedily with a harsh flick of his tongue. Teeth scraped over his gaping mouth, dragging up biting tastes of lips that he forced wider with every pass of his tongue sliding sloppily and wet into him. Gene’s attack caught the roof of his mouth, and Sam shuddered with a shocked surge of pleasure; another sound climbed up his throat, something more like a moan that Gene chased down with surprisingly gentle fingers that slid up to his throat. His large hand cradled the side of his neck, angling him with softly sweeping fingertips whose calluses still scraped rough against his skin.

Even more than his kisses, the contradiction of coarse skin and careful pressure at his throat filled Sam with a reckless need. He reached blindly for Gene, took hold of his hips with trembling hands for a delirious moment before Gene wrenched away, stumbling backward just as quickly as he had advanced.

Panting hard, Sam stared up at Gene, his senses blown by the sight of unmistakable arousal suffusing his face, turning his lips red and his eyes feral even as they darted evasively aside, refusing to meet Sam’s baffled gaze. He sucked in a necessary mouthful of breath, tried to will his hands to move, to reach out again…

And Gene was already gone, turned on his heel and out the door before Sam could do anything to stop him.


	9. Chapter 9

‘Gene Hunt.’

‘Hmn.’

Sam tilted his head, trying to see in the pale ghost of Tony Crane some vestige of the man Gene had once considered a friend, much less the omnipotent bogeyman that Sam himself had so desperately reviled. There was nothing left in him but diminished desperation, a frail shape that had been scraped bare from the inside and stuffed freshly full of the madness that rippled around him in this place.

‘Gene Hunt,’ he tried again, watching for some deeper reaction. Their conversation so far today had been an abortive symphony of sounds dancing around the confirmation Sam had come to find. At the repeated use of the name, some sign of life flickered in eyes that had lost much of their colour, sky blue gone grey and withdrawn.

‘Gene…’ he echoed, mustering a slow nod. ‘Oh, yes. Top bloke. Good man.’

‘Yes,’ Sam agreed.

Crane’s face split in a lewd grin. ‘Bloody gorgeous prick,’ he added, easy as anything. ‘Knows how to use it, too.’

Sam twitched, hating the heat he could feel rising in his face. ‘I think we’re done here.’

Crane tongued the inside of his cheek and offered a distended smile that shot another dart of uneasiness through Sam’s chest. ‘Oh… no, Inspector Tyler,’ he said softly, eyes wide and distant. ‘I don’t think I’m anywhere near through with you yet.’

Rising from his chair, Sam cast a wary eye to the exit before returning Crane’s pale gaze. ‘I suppose not,’ he agreed reluctantly.

‘I’ll find you,’ he continued, eyebrows high on his furrowed brow. ‘Oh, yes… I’ll find you, and I’ll make you scream for what you’ve done to me.’

Resigned, all Sam could do was nod. ‘You will,’ he said softly. ‘You’ll take me, torture me, drive me to reckless, horrible things. But you know what?’ He leaned down, resting his hands on the table’s edge as he offered a conspiratorial smile of his own.

‘For me, it’s already over. I’m done with you, but you’re nowhere near done with me. I’ll be the one haunting _you_ from now on.’

The rage that contorted Crane’s face did little to ease Sam’s guilty conscience, but his sudden outburst gathered enough orderlies around Crane that he was able to slip out of the visitor’s lounge relatively unnoticed. He saw Dr. Thackeray burst from a stairwell at the end of the hall and thought he saw the psychiatrist’s owl eyes widen with the beginnings of indignation as he jogged clumsily past, but the commotion from the lounge was clearly a higher priority. Sam took the same stairwell back down to the ground floor, making sure to nod his thanks to the helpfully ignorant young nurse who had shown the utmost respect for his warrant card before strolling out to the parking lot.

Somehow, the sight of Gene waiting with the Cortina did not surprise him as much as it should have done.

‘Get in.’ Gene indicated the passenger door of his car with a short jerk of his head, but Sam hung back, crossing his arms against the high winds off the countryside.

‘How’d you know I’d come?’ he asked sharply.

‘Crane’s quack called to let me know.’

‘Bastard.’

Gene shrugged, finished his cigarette and threw the fag end to the ground. ‘Reckons you haven’t been quite the help he’d been looking for, from the sounds of it.’

‘Is that so.’

‘Mmn.’ One of his white loafers twisted his cigarette into the gravel. ‘Also reckons he’s got a lovely padded cell and pretty white coat with your name on, if you’re interested.’

‘And what did you have to say to that?’

Another shrug, infuriatingly non-committal. ‘They let you leave, didn’t they?’

‘Maybe I busted out,’ he suggested, teasing with a light-heartedness that he didn’t necessarily feel. ‘You could be aiding and abetting the escape of a mentally disturbed individual.’

‘Suppose I am, yeah.’ Gene opened the driver’s door. ‘Get in.’

‘What about the car?’ Though Sam was already walking inexorably to the Cortina, he spared a backward glance at the unmarked car from the station pool, sitting in lonely isolation across the wide gravel lot.

‘We’ll send plod to pick it up in the morning.’

There was little arguing with that. Sam shrugged and climbed into the passenger seat he had long thought of as being his own, fastening his seatbelt despite Gene’s exasperated sigh and reaching instinctively for the handhold above the window as the Cortina peeled out onto the country road, scattering gravel in its rattling wake. He held on tightly long after Gene had slowed to a more leisurely speed, surprisingly mindful of the narrow curving road but Sam refused to relax into the uneasy silence that filled the car. Gene’s silence was so loud that it vibrated through Sam like the first warning of a storm that might never break as the minutes ticked mutely onward.

‘I’m sorry you had to find out that way.’

Sam threw him a startled glance, having long since resigned himself to a silent ride back to Manchester. ‘I’m not even sure what I’ve found out,’ he replied cautiously, watching the muscles clench at the edge of Gene’s jaw. He seemed to be chewing on some caustic comeback or another, but what fell loose instead was a weary sigh.

‘C’mon, Sam,’ he muttered, glaring at the winding country road ahead. ‘You’re a clever lad, you can put it together.’

Thinking on that, Sam supposed he could draw a handful of conclusions, though they all left him grasping for better understanding. ‘I suppose I can assume that you’re less of a homophobe than I took you for,’ he observed bluntly, perversely gratified by the blistering glare he received in return.

‘Don’t be a prick about this,’ he snapped. ‘I’m not in the bloody mood.’

‘And I am?’ Crossing his arms, Sam glared out the window as he fought to gather his thoughts. ‘You could’ve just said something,’ he muttered accusingly. He was exhausted already, and this conversation had scarcely begun.

‘Was always one bloody thing or another, Sam.’ Gene’s gloved palm drummed an anxious beat against the steering wheel. ‘Not that I didn’t try, like… Hell, asked you out to dinner the second the missus left town, only next thing I know you’re running all over Rusholme and yelling at radios…’

‘Yeah.’ Sam cringed. He didn’t need to be reminded again of the cell death, the tensions that had fractured and broken all around them in the messy aftermath.

‘And then there was that business with Vic Tyler… I still don’t know what that was all about and _no_ , don’t even try to explain it to me now, you drive me round the bend enough as it is.’ His quelling glare made Sam snap his jaw shut. ‘Figured that would just be the status quo from here on out, really, was even getting used to the idea… maybe the week after that you’d get it into your head that the little stray dog what went running after Chris that day down by the arches was really your great-grandfather come home from the wars or summat and we’d have to give him a gun and a badge and let him ride in the Cortina with us just to shut you up.’

‘Oh, c’mon…’

‘But then there was Tony Crane.’ Gene drummed his fingers against the wheel, lips tight with his refusal to say any more on that, at least not yet. Sam swallowed nervously, eyes darting between his stony profile and the diminishing haystacks in the fields beyond his passenger window.

‘If it’s any consolation,’ he offered quietly, ‘I’d have preferred the dog too.’

The reluctant hint of a smile quirked the corner of Gene’s mouth, and for a while they both seemed content to pass this journey in an easier, more familiar silence than before. Sam let himself relax into the sprawling views of farmers’ fields and trailing stone walls, hypnotized by the placid countryside and the voiceless crackle of the car’s transistor radio, nearly convinced that all might be right enough with this world until the scattered homes started to gather closer together and resolve themselves into the streets of Manchester. Almost regretting the end of the drive, Sam waited for the inevitable turnings of the road towards his flat in the less reputable part of town, his placid peace cracking at the edges once more when those familiar streets refused to materialize.

‘Um.’ Sam cleared his throat, reluctant to break the ceasefire that had fallen between them, but… ‘You just missed the turning there.’

‘No I didn’t.’ Eyes fixed to the road, Gene took a left turn that sent them even further in the wrong direction.

‘Yeah, you did,’ he stabbed back, craning his neck to stare down the darkening road behind the Cortina. ‘My flat… it’s down that way…’

‘Not going to your flat.’ With another corner, the darkened storefronts gave way to rows upon rows of politely modest homes. ‘At least, not yet.’

Gene’s flat tone cut off any protest so Sam swallowed down the lump of anxiety that had leapt back into his throat, shifting in his seat with a faint squeak of leather on leather as house after house slid past the passenger window. He counted doorsteps and gardens among the seamless red bricks, considered how even the plainest of them was nicer than any place he had lived in his childhood as the car slowed to a stop partway along a narrow street. Peering out the window, Sam could spot nothing about this place to make it worth stopping; these houses were as unremarkable as the others.

The sudden vacuum of sound created by the Cortina’s engine shutting off lent a new oppressive weight to their shared silence. Sam shot a glance at Gene as he palmed his keys and reached for the door handle. ‘What are we…’

Gene didn’t wait to see if Sam would follow; he knew too well to assume otherwise. Palms sweating deep in his jacket pockets, Sam trailed Gene through a low garden gate that looked preposterously small in his large gloved hand and up a paved path to a black painted door made somewhat less oppressive by its large pane of crackle glass. This home, again, was less lovingly kept than the others, though it was tidy enough in its mean simplicity.

The rattle of keys drew Sam’s curious eye down to Gene’s hand. ‘Hold on,’ he said, eyes widening as Gene deftly fed a key into the single lock. ‘Is this… this is your house?’

‘Bloody hell, you really are a detective, aren’t you?’ Gene shouldered the door open as aggressively as he would have done without a key, Sam close at his heels as he bypassed the darkened staircase ahead and veered to the right and into a dim front parlour lit only by the late sunlight filtering through dusty net curtains. ‘You think you’re so clever, you can tell me what else you see here.’

His wary eye lingered over Gene as he shrugged out of his coat, turning it carelessly inside out in search of his fags before tossing the camelhair over a nearby armchair. That chair, Sam noted, was one of the few sticks of furniture in the room, poorly attended by a matching footstool, a straight-backed dining chair that matched nothing at all, and a television set on a low stand. The faintest first puff from Gene’s cigarette obscured little of the discoloured walls that showed fainter rectangles where pictures once hung. When Sam cast his eyes downward, he couldn’t unsee the imprint of an absent settee and second armchair in the worn plush of the pale blue carpet.

‘Gene…’ He shook his head, pressed the edge of a finger to his mouth and tried to chew out the words that needed saying. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t know…’

‘I’m not.’ Lifting a half-empty ashtray from the otherwise bare mantle, Gene dropped into the armchair on top of his coat. ‘Were never much of a good husband to her anyhow… always putting the job first, and last for that matter. You know how it is.’ Green eyes blinked piercingly through the smoke to meet Sam’s stare, mutual understanding flaring on Gene’s next inhale and making the cigarette’s ember sear bright.

‘I might do, yeah.’ Staring uncomfortably around the room again, Sam sighed and, after the briefest hesitation, took a tentative seat at the edge of the rail-backed dining chair. ‘Why did we come here?’

Gene glanced away from the plain question, squinting hard at the space where the settee would once have been. ‘Well, yeah, can’t say it were for tea and cakes, now can I?’ With a low sniff, he slouched back in his chair, tapped the ash off the end of his fag. ‘Just thought you should see, is all,’ he said finally. ‘Whatever it is you may think of me now, you need to know that I wasn’t betraying her at the same time. That’s not what it was like, got it?’

The low sincerity of Gene’s voice rushed inexplicable pinpricks of pleasure across his skin. ‘Yeah,’ he agreed softly, hands clenched between his knees. ‘Yeah, got it.’

Gene nodded curtly. ‘Good.’ He seemed to search Sam’s attentive face for some sign of disbelief before tucking his chin down to his chest with another short nod. ‘Still married, mind,’ he added in a low mumble. ‘I offered, but she wanted no part of a divorce, said it would break her old mum’s heart… well, that and she swears she won’t be weighing herself down with any other big stinking lout of a bloke so long as she lives…’

‘Her loss,’ Sam said, smiling sadly to see the heaviness of Gene’s lower lip twitch with a bit more of his usual self-confidence. ‘You’re a good man.’

‘Not that good, I hope.’ But Gene betrayed himself with the faint flush of colour rising in his face.

‘Better than I’ve been through all this,’ Sam admitted. He could feel the lonely ache of this house sinking through leather and skin, filling him with regret. ‘Crane was right about that much. I’ve done some… horrible things, you have no idea…’

‘I’ve got some idea.’ Gene shrugged, took a final drag off his cigarette. ‘We all of us do some bad things once in a while, Sam. Way the world works is all. Tried telling you that how many times now…’ He trailed off with a sigh that sent smoke gusting across the room. ‘Well. Don’t matter now.’

Sam squinted with a frown as Gene stubbed out his cigarette in the ashtray with a somber finality. ‘Doesn’t it?’ he asked softly.

‘Nah.’ Gene shrugged unconvincingly. ‘We’re no different than we were before this mess. I’m still a bastard, you’re still a nutter, status bloody quo and all that. Best just leave it at that.’

‘And what if I don’t want to leave it at that?’ Though the question slipped out as soft as the last, it tasted entirely different in Sam’s mouth. He rose from his uncomfortable seat, crossed the near-empty room with tentative steps. The guarded, piercingly forbidding eye Gene kept fixed on his movements only reinforced Sam’s impression of circling an animal as wounded as it was deadly.

‘You would if you knew what was good for you,’ he said hoarsely, glaring up at Sam from beneath furrowed eyebrows. The threat only made Sam grin, not without a touch of self-deprecation.

‘If only I knew,’ he smirked wryly, drawing to a stop between Gene’s spread knees. ‘They say I’m mad, after all.’

‘They might be on to something.’ With Sam standing so close, Gene dropped his gaze rather than turn his head up to maintain eye contact. ‘C’mon,’ he said gruffly, ‘time I got you back to yours.’

‘No.’

Gene glanced back up at him with a reproachful frown. ‘Sam…’ he sighed, the protest choking itself off as Sam planted a knee on the armchair’s wide seat in the narrow gap between its arm and Gene’s thigh. He went still at the first brush of their legs, eyes wide yet cautious as Sam settled himself into the chair straddling Gene’s lap, kneeling upright to maintain the last appearance of polite distance even as his groin stirred instinctively to feel the heat of Gene’s body beneath him.

‘Why would I want to go back to that flat?’ he asked softly. After a hesitation born of too many options, Sam indulged himself first with a slow rake of fingers through Gene’s disheveled hair, enjoying the smooth flow of blond strands in his hand. Pushing the long fringe back from his eyes, Sam had a clear view of the disbelieving look Gene was aiming at him.

‘Why would you want to stay here?’

There was still so much doubt in the question that Sam knew there was nothing more urgent in the world than to kiss it away. He leaned in slowly, gave Gene time to push him away if it came to that but by the time he gently pressed his mouth to Gene’s, the scowl had softened to meet him halfway. Unlike that first impulsive attack in the gents, this was slow, almost lazily patient as Sam explored the contours of Gene’s welcoming mouth, though it didn’t take long for Gene’s tongue to take a lascivious turn that had Sam squirming in his lap. His fingers tightened in Gene’s hair as his hips plastered themselves to the contour of a rounded belly and found encouragement in two large hands cupping his arse through his jeans. With a low gasp, Sam wrenched his lips away from Gene’s teasing teeth, though no force in this universe could stop him from writhing greedily into Gene’s solid heat.

‘Tell me something,’ Sam breathed, hushed past the swelling weight of lust and something more tightening in his throat. ‘Did your wife take the bed with her as well?’

Gene’s thighs twitched and tensed beneath Sam’s legs. ‘No, can’t say she did,’ he murmured slowly, heated eyes tracking down between their close bodies. ‘Wouldn’t have been worth the bother hauling it down the stairs… rather a large thing, that bed.’

‘Is that so?’ Sam hissed in a sharp breath as Gene’s rough fingertips ventured further down the seat of his trousers and up between his legs. ‘Large, you say?’

‘Not the only large thing you’ll be finding up there, Sammy-boy.’

With a low groan, Sam rubbed up tighter to Gene’s body, reaching back to slide a hand down between his thighs. The erection he felt tenting Gene’s trousers was impressive, already exceeding the grasp of his exploring fingers, though Sam enjoyed even more the low growl that rumbled from Gene’s chest as he groped along its length. ‘Think I already found it down here,’ he murmured.

‘There’s my clever detective,’ Gene said sardonically, rewarding Sam with a series of suckling bites at the juncture of his neck and shoulder that made him cry out shakily with need. His fingers convulsed greedily over Gene’s constricted cock, his brain short circuiting between its weight in his hand and the tease of Gene’s fingers over his arse.

‘Maybe we can skip the bed,’ he suggested breathlessly.

‘Cobblers.’ One of Gene’s hands closed around Sam’s wrist behind his back, drawing his hand away gently enough but with a firmness that sent a fresh shiver of arousal down his spine. ‘If we’re doing this, we’re doing it properly,’ Gene insisted roughly, tugging his shirttails loose from his trousers. ‘And properly means you, stripped starkers, and spread out all over my nice, large bed where I’ve got all the room I need to have you however I want.’

Gene’s hands were restless as he spoke, sliding up under his shirt, kneading his arse, squeezing a thigh, teasing a nipple. Those hands hadn’t even touched his cock yet, and Sam was already desperate. ‘Or there’s the floor.’

‘Bed,’ Gene insisted again, pinching reproachfully at the nipple between his fingers and making Sam gasp. ‘You’re not some cheap slag.’

The doubt reared itself unbidden from some dark corner of Sam’s mind, slowing the rapid thrum of blood in his veins. ‘Aren’t I?’ he asked, the question slipping out before he could stop it.

‘Eh?’ Gene drew back with a frown, already wary.

‘It’s just… well…’ Biting his tongue, Sam shook his head. ‘You don’t know… what Crane and I…’

‘Blimey, don’t think I need to know, do you?’

‘But…’

Gene sighed, letting his hands drift to rest on Sam’s hips. ‘Like I said, Sam, we all do bad things once in a while. Don’t change you being a good, decent bloke.’ His gaze shifted down Sam’s body. ‘A good, decent bloke I’d like to shag sometime today if it’s quite alright with you.’

With a grin, Sam clambered to his feet and offered Gene a hand up. ‘To bed, then,’ he agreed. ‘Although…’

‘Bloody hell…’

‘You didn’t necessarily say I couldn’t be bad,’ Sam said slyly. ‘Once in a while.’

Heat burned away the irritation lingering in Gene’s eyes. ‘Fair enough,’ he agreed hoarsely, tongue darting over his lips. ‘Now you mention it, seems you’re getting pretty close to downright wicked right about now.’

‘Oh, you have no idea.’ And winding a hand around the length of Gene’s tie, Sam dragged them both to bed.


End file.
